Thread by @ImmCivilRights

“Just Following Orders”-A mass collaborative thread by #ImmigrationTwitter of things ICE attorneys have done since DHS was created (not in chronological order)
- Prosecute children as young as 1 yr old who lack attorneys
- Add fake court dates & addresses to charging documents

- Deport people, including children, with pending, approvable green card applications
- Prosecute Muslim men rounded up in Kansas Kris Kobach’s illegal NSEERS program.
- Argue against releasing elderly and medically fragile people from jails and prisons overrun by #COVID19

- Argue that “when released” means “after release” and therefore people who committed crimes 20 years ago don’t get bond.
- Oppose releases by people in ICE custody for over 3 years.
- Refuse to stipulate to any continuance
- Refuse to waive appeal on any case

- Jail and deport kids as young as 3 who don’t have lawyers to defend themselves.
- Argue against extending court deadlines for people whose labor certifications entitle them to green cards, if only the govt would hurry up processing
- Claim in court that trans ppl aren’t a PSG

- refuse to follow a 9th Circuit order requiring mandatory disclosure of A-Files where a person in proceedings is making a claim to US Citizenship
- defend transfers of people across the country without notice to counsel or their families, and oppose changes of venue back home

- reopen administratively closed cases of people with #DACA
- refuse to allow people who qualify for #DACA time to apply before getting deported
- claim in a quasi-judicial proceeding that domestic violence is simply a private matter and doesn’t constitute persecution.

- Defend denials of credible and reasonable fear claims when the interview was not conducted in the subject’s native language.
- argue against appointment of counsel for people who are mentally incompetent to stand trial
- prosecute and deport those people to potential death

- Claim that constitutional violations by ICE and BP during arrest aren’t “egregious” enough to warrant suppression of evidence
- contend there is no constitutional due-process right in immigration court
- prosecute and deport parents who were separated from their children

- Refuse to agree to release of people who’ve been pardoned for the crime that subjects them to deportability and civil incarceration.
- show up for hearings without the person’s file and ask for continuances without offering any cause whatsoever while opposing our continuances

- Argue, for the purposes of continuing prolonged imprisonment of asylum-seekers, there’s a significant likelihood of deportation to Iraq in the reasonably foreseeable future of Chaldean Christians and Kurds when the Iraqi government explicitly refused to accept those flights.

- introduce border station statements from agents who claimed to interview children as young as 2 where agents claim (under oath) that the kids are coming to the US to “seek work” and “add to the ‘illegal’ population in the US”
- prosecute the political enemies of their agency.

I’m gonna go ahead and pitch to a colleague. Popcorn @s_phia_ —>>follow this account for the next bit of this thread.

In case it’s not immediately obvious, this thread and the contributions to it from colleagues are the sound of the frogs screaming because the water has finally approached a boiling point. Many have been screaming for years. Still others were smart enough to jump from the pot.

- Prosecute adult family members of kids in ORR custody when those adults step forward to sponsor the kids and bring them home, with the expressed policy goal of reducing the number of sponsors.
- Require respondents in ICE custody to file a #FOIA for the documents in ICE files.

- use “admissions” of workers rounded up factory raids and mass-prosecuted without individual access to counsel in AN ACTUAL CATTLE PEN at the fairgrounds to seek those folks’ deportation.

- Use arcane procedural authority to demand original documents of asylum seekers for review by the document Fraud Detection unit, and then never return them, preventing the person from allowing their family members to use those originals after we won her case asylum case.

-Put a red sticky note on a newly filed NTA to signal to the court and the clerk’s Office DHS wants expediting treatment of this case with the first available hearing an no continuances, but omit the sticky note on the service copy, so the immigrant/their lawyer never know abt it

- Block DOJ/EOIR from issuing regulations that would empower IJs and EOIR to sanction DHS attorneys for misconduct and exclude them from practice before the tribunal for misconduct. As a result, IJ sanction authority is only one-sided and only against migrants’ representatives.

- Tell an Immigration Judge there’s no point to issuing the subpoena for an ICE agent to testify because DHS won’t honor it and the IJ will have to file an action with the federal district court to enforce it, which, ICE Atty says, IJ lacks the power to do. ICE agents don’t come.