Certiorari Denied: Remembering the Roberts Court's Shameful Abandonment of Torture Victims

This piece by Dorothy Samuels, a "senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University school of Law," certainly resonates with me!  In it she enumerates three cases of US conducted torture of detainees, one a US citizen, where the US Supreme Court refused to review the cases.  Check out her concluding two paragraphs:

"The Bush White House disgraced itself by authorizing torture and failing to comply with constitutional limits and Congress disgraced itself by allowing it. But, as Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU says, "the signal failure at this point is the failure of courts to enforce those limits."

"In swatting away the appeals of torture victims with serial denials of review, the Roberts Court abdicated it crucial oversight role envisioned by the Constitution, further harmed America's reputation around the world and shut off one of the last remaining avenues for accountability."

The sad fact is that the Bush administration, operating directly from the office of the president and vice president, authorized torture in violation of international law and federal criminal statutes. The US Supreme Court did nothing about it, even when presented with an opportunity to grant torture victims the right to seek redress against the government. This is the essence of impunity.

The Bush Administration's torture policies are one of the principal reasons I became a Democrat. The defining moment for me came when I was representing a Tamil from Sri Lanka who had fled persecution and torture in his own country.  

This was during the period when Rumsfeld was advocating "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were "torture" by any common sense and legal definition of the term.

It quite a shock for me when I realized, while preparing an immigration court submission, that the Sri Lankan Government conduct I was claiming made my client a torture victim was less painful and injurious than what the United States Government was doing to its detainees.

For me there was no going back after that.

"We're rounding 'em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way."

That was Donald Trump holding forth on 60 Minutes last night how his administration will deport 11 to 12,000,000 "illegal immigrants."

Also, to show that he'll be a president with style, and class, we learned that the wall he intends to build along the entire length of the US Southern border with Mexico will be "a real wall. It'll be a wall that works. It'll actually be a wall that will look good, believe it or not. 'Cause what they have now is a joke. They're--they're ugly, little and don't work."  Also, "it's not going to be very expensive."

Underscoring the utter stupidity of this proposal is the fact that the population Trump proposes to uproot and return to their countries of origin is about the same as the State of Ohio.  That is to say, 11.5 million people.

With few exceptions, anyone in this country illegally who is apprehended by immigration authorities has a right to contest his "removal" (the term of art for deportation since 1996) in immigration court. And, in proper cases, even people with final orders of removal have rights to contest them if they can establish they will be persecuted in their home countries. (In the last two years I won two such cases).

Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that our immigration court system is broken. To cite one example, in Newark Immigration Court where I practice mostly there is a present backlog of 27,000 cases for five (soon to be four) immigration judges.  The immigration court system cannot cope with the number of cases that exist now, before Trump's planned exodus.

I can only assume that Trump's appeal to the anti-immigrant base of the Republican Party is, like everything he does, all for show. However, the discerning reader will see in his statements a bit of a Trojan horse on immigration. He seems to propose some form of "amnesty" by suggesting that "If they've done well they're going out and they're coming back in legally."  I guess it has to be that way because, according to Trump, "we're going to have a tremendous, beautiful, wide-open door. Nice big door. We want people to come into the country."

For Trump's "plan" to work there would have to be major changes to the Immigration and Nationality Act. I don't see that happening at all, at least with a Republican House of Representatives.

I would also add that there's no nice or humane way to break up families. Trump's scheme is unworkable, would be ruinously expensive, and is plainly contrary to current immigration law.  It's just not happening, though it is troubling to think he might actually believe he could pull it off.

An Introduction of Sorts

Well, I've been meaning to do this for a long time.  I finally worked up the motivation after observing the horrific beginnings of the 2016 presidential campaign.

I'm a 66-year-old lawyer who has been practicing law since 1977. I was a "litigator" in Philadelphia for the first three years, where I did insurance defense work including, believe it or not, some maritime law.  I got sick of being an associate; of law firm politics; and the drudgery of cleaning up other people's messes; plus, things "weren't working out" with the firm. So in 1980 I became a corporate lawyer with a defense and industrial service corporation headquartered in Northern New Jersey (a pretty famous name in aerospace history, by the way).  There I "polished up the handle so carefully" that in 1999 I became the Company's general counsel.

I left corporate life in 2001 after major differences with the incoming CEO. I like to think that I'm the only General Counsel in American corporate history who was fired for winning the big case rather than losing it, but I suppose my former corporate masters would really say that I wasn't subservient enough. (As a fellow GC once told me when I was just starting out in my new role, "What you have to understand about this job is that you're nothing but a high paid flunky for management.")

I did find statement that rather disillusioning after having spent 20 years climbing to the summit of corporate law. Having been ejected from the corporate cocoon, I had to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my career.

I settled on immigration law for variety of reasons.  First, almost all of us are immigrants to America in one way or another, and I grew up amid stories of my own Irish immigrant roots going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It stuck.  Second, I wanted to do something that was socially relevant.  The importance of immigration couldn't have been underscored more than by 9/11. Third, I really did want to try something new, and immigration law is about as far away as from corporate law as one can get.

Last but not least, after the end of my long first marriage, which coincided with my departure from corporate life, I started dating an "illegal alien" from Russia. I'm happy to say that I was able to "sponsor" her after we got married.  We are still together and she is now a naturalized American citizen.  So, my practice of immigration law had a personal element that made my clients' concerns very real to me.

One reason I've decided to speak up in this blog is because of the anti-immigrant madness we see infecting the Republican Party and nativist right wing now. The calumnies cast against my clients are so vile and ignorant that I feel compelled to speak out. My hope is that various case studies and "war stories" will show my readership what it's like being an immigration lawyer; and, more importantly, what the people whom I serve are really like.

Finally, you'll get a dose of fairly strong "progressive" politics in these pages. My political transformation mirrors my professional one. I've gone from being a "conservative" Republican preoccupied with national defense to a passionate Democrat who believes that the real threat to our democracy comes from within.