Backed up immigration courts provide slow processing

SAN BENITO — The young refugee retraced the long, twisted journey that landed him on the American side of the Hidalgo International Bridge earlier this year, pleading for asylum in the U.S., fearing deportation would amount to a death sentence.

The 24-year-old had fled his native Ethiopia months earlier, fearing near-constant government threats in retaliation for vocally supporting an opposing political party. Brutally beaten and twice thrown in prison, the young man was told authorities would kill him if arrested a third time.

His long path to the U.S. took him through Africa, Dubai, Cuba and eventually to Colombia, trekking through dense jungle to the Panama border. Over the course of months, a series of busses, trains and long hikes through Central America ended at the Hidalgo bridge, where he turned himself in and was immediately shipped to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Port Isabel, where he would stay for seven months.

“I was confused. I cried always because I didn’t know what was going to happen to me,” the man recalled. “I was scared. I know that if I go back (home) they’re going to kill me.”

The man’s account echoes the stories of hundreds of others who come to the U.S. seeking political asylum every year in U.S. immigration courts, a system that experts fear is already strained and overwhelmed with exploding caseloads. In Harlingen’s immigration court alone, data shows that pending cases have more than doubled over the past fiscal year.

A far cry from that ICE facility, the man now bunks in a small cabin at La Posada Providencia, a shelter for those going through asylum proceedings at small, open San Benito compound with lush gardens, a community kitchen and classrooms where a dozen or so refugees learn English and review their asylum cases with local immigration lawyers.

The American Bar Association created ProBAR more than two decades ago to assist asylum-seekers detained in South Texas through the confusing patchwork of immigration court proceedings, said Meredith Linsky, director of the ABA’s South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project.

Touring La Posada this week, ABA members and local immigration lawyers heard the stories of refugees from all over the world who fled their homes to seek asylum in the U.S. In telling his story, one Brazilian man looked toward Linsky, repeating, “They aren’t lawyers, they’re angels.”

Unlike in criminal cases where defendants are appointed public defenders if they can’t afford a lawyer, those who go before immigration courts must pay for their own, hope to find pro-bono help or go the proceedings alone, often with limited English and little-to-no understanding of how the system works, Linsky said.

The same goes for unaccompanied children, explained Karen Grisez, chair of the ABA’s Commission on Immigration.

“(Children), who as a matter of law are legally recognized as being incompetent to represent themselves…They have to respond to charges against them. They have to say what forms of relief they want to apply for. They have to testify under oath and be judged on their credibility, even when under any other system they’re not legally competent to do so.”

Along with asylum seekers, ProBAR has expanded its focus to children’s’ cases, Grisez explained, saying increased federal enforcement in recent years has led to a serious rise in the number of unaccompanied children detained in South Texas who now face removal proceedings.

Earlier this year, the ABA commissioned and later endorsed a report calling for an overhaul of the immigration court system, saying federal crackdowns on illegal immigrants had stretched the courts’ resources too thin, with caseloads for immigration judges now about three times that of federal district judges.

Among other recommendations, the ABA called for providing legal representation for children and those suffering from mental illness, along with cutting down the number of immigrants without criminal histories who are thrown into ICE detention centers.

What could likely compound the problem, Grisez said, is that lawmakers in Texas and other states have already begun to introduce Arizona-style immigration laws for upcoming legislative sessions, which if passed, could further stress the system and throw thousands of new cases at the courts, Grisez said.

Immigration judges, Grisez said, are already under immense pressure to make speedy decisions and to move cases quickly through the system, even with complex asylum hearings, given the mountain of backlogged cases facing the courts.

“Judges don’t have enough time and they’re forced to make very speedy decisions from the bench,” Grisez remarked. The overload forces children, asylum seekers and anyone else funneled through immigration proceedings to wait even longer for their day in court, often in ICE detention facilities, she said.

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research arm of Syracuse University that analyzes data from the nation’s immigration courts, reported at the end of October that the average wait time for pending cases was 456 days and that backlogged cases reached an all-time high in fiscal year 2010.

Harlingen’s immigration court, the report said, had the fastest buildup in cases during 2010, with pending cases jumping 127 percent to over 4,000 cases, compared to 1,780 in 2009.

ABA President-Elect William T. Robinson, who along with Grisez toured Harlingen’s immigration court and local children’s detention and refugee centers this week, said, “This (backlog) cannot help in asylum cases. It’s a matter of numbers and more persons need to be processed.”

“Rather than improving the system, the demand on that system has grown,” Robinson said. “The challenge really is overwhelming…The numbers have not gone down from everything that we see. All the statistics tell us that there’s even more pressure on the system.”

The U.S. Justice Department reports that it currently has 262 immigration judges ruling in 59 immigration courts across the country, including 23 new judges sworn in earlier this month, none of whom were assigned to the local Harlingen and Los Fresnos courts.

The ABA in its report said the justice department would need to inject at least 100 new judges into the system to manage current caseloads.

___

Michael Barajas is a reporter for the Valley Morning Star.