
Asylum seekers detained in New Mexico have a slim chance of winning their cases. Most are processed at an immigration court in El Paso where some judges granted as few as 1 to 3% of asylum cases last year. The Otero immigration court in Chaparral, New Mexico, is not much better, says immigration attorney Allegra Love, director of the Santa Fe Dreamers Project.
The Santa Fe based organization is one of six plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed this week alleging that the Trump administration has "weaponized" the immigration court system to further its anti-immigrant agenda.
The suit was filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Innovation Law Lab against President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr and the Executive Office for Immigration Review. It asks federal courts to denounce multiple policies that the suit claims have led to "pervasive dysfunction and bias" in the immigration court system and make it nearly impossible for most asylum seekers' cases to receive a fair review.
These include policies that, according to the lawsuit, incentivize judges for rushing through cases and accelerate family cases to the point that families do not have adequate time to find legal representation. On the other hand, the lawsuit denounces policies that force other people to wait indefinitely for their cases to be heard.
The lawsuit accuses Barr of ignoring recommendations and evidence presented by the immigration review office indicating that ineffective practices and under-staffing are responsible for creating a backlog of nearly 1 million asylum cases. Most of these people are held in detention centers while they await their court dates. Because of the backlog, the wait for some can be as long as three or four years.
The ability for asylum seekers to find legal counsel and translation services and gather the evidence for their cases while they are held in a detention center is severely limited. For instance, Love says that many centers charge exorbitant fees for phone calls and limit visitation.
After receiving notice that a court date has been set, many asylum seekers have no more than a matter of days to gather the information for their case.
In October last year the immigration review office began using performance metrics that require immigration judges to complete 700 cases per year, or about three cases per day. The lawsuit argues that this incentivizes judges to go through cases quickly without attending to the particularities of each case.
Research published by the SPLC in June found that many immigration attorneys face immigration courts where judges are not held accountable for biased and abusive behavior. The report details numerous instances of judges deciding the fate of an asylum seeker before hearing the case, yelling at or insulting the asylum seeker and their attorneys, arbitrarily refusing evidence or making up rules as they go along.
Love says she and the other attorneys who work for the Santa Fe Dreamers Project experience this treatment regularly.
Last month she filed a formal complaint against Immigration Judge Kathy French at the Otero County Processing Center for denying attorneys extra time to prepare evidence for a case that had been scheduled only days before the court date. In the complaint, Love wrote that French treated both Love and the asylum seeker in an "abusive, mocking, and aggressive" manner, including screaming at and and bullying the asylum seeker.
French denied the case, and Love says the asylum seeker will be sent back to his home country where he faces targeted violence because of his sexual orientation.
Love says she's worked in immigration courts in Denver, where judges approved around 40% of cases. These courts, she says, function as they should. But the El Paso and Otero courts exist in what the lawsuit describes as "asylum-free zones" where judges have granted a negligible number of cases and asylum seekers come into court with the odds stacked against them. These are the courts where abuses are most common, says Love.
"These courts are basically not functioning legitimately. That's how impossible it is to win an asylum case there," she says.
"[Asylum] cases need to be handled with the utmost care because we're talking about people whose lives are at stake," says Love. "If we send them home, they could die."