Federal Judges Still Do Not Get How the Border Works

[In It to Win It]

B&S

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Florida blocked a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy that gives officers more discretion to parole, or release from detention, asylum-seekers who arrive at the border. Parole, wrote Judge T. Kent Wetherell II in a bit of Carlsonian prose, has “turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country.” The Biden administration has elected not to appeal.

Wetherell’s opinion betrays how little he understands about immigration law, let alone the reality of life at the border. Because more people seek entry into the United States than the agency can detain, DHS officials have always needed to triage arrivals, detaining only those they believe to be a danger while releasing others to the care of sponsors, who can guide them through the process of seeking legal status outside of a carceral setting. Last October, for example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) paroled in close to 90,000 people who arrived at the border, and detained only 19,000.

Under President Joe Biden, the government began shifting resources away from detention. In late 2021, DHS repurposed its family detention centers to only hold adults, temporarily ending the practice of detaining infants and children, too. The administration also asked Congress for 9,000 fewer beds for this year’s immigration enforcement budget. DHS, preparing for this reduction in capacity, changed its policies to expand the availability of parole. Florida’s Republican-controlled government, led by Governor Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody, asked Wetherell, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2019, to stop DHS from following through.

Wetherell’s opinion depicts the border as a lawless free-for-all, where thousands of migrants can evade ICE and avoid deportation by exploiting Biden’s naive generosity. Naturally, incarceration is the only solution to this crisis that Wetherell can imagine. “Detention is the surest way to ensure that an alien will not abscond pending completion of their immigration proceedings,” he writes.

The numbers suggest otherwise. Once they receive court dates, paroled migrants have a 99.4 percent appearance rate at their first hearing, and a 95.6 percent appearance rate for their final hearing, according to ICE’s data. Asylum-seekers aren’t trying to disappear. They want their day in court, and the chance to make their case for legal status so they don’t have to deal with this country’s broken immigration system anymore. Thanks to Wetherell, more people could soon be stuck in legal limbo for longer.

[Irish_Dem]

1. Judges are looking more and more out of touch with reality.

Like GOP politicians.

[Thomas Hurt]

2. The christofascists say they don't want them in the US and yet they do their damnest to keep them...

How about they get a larger budget for Immigration and hire some more judges to process cases faster.

[Initech]

3. Once again, Fox News ruins everything.

[modrepub]

4. Under Staffed

It seems to me the whole asylum system is under resourced, intentionally. One party has convinced themselves that people outside of the US will never support them. So, why put the infrastructure to process their claims?

Result, overwhelmed system, slow processing times, causing more people evading the system because it's bureaucratic, slow and unresponsive. Which gives the party that doesn't want immigrants more of a reason to repress them.