From January 20 to the end of March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in our region  increased by 80 percent over 2016. That brought a big increase in need for full representation, especially for people in removal proceedings.

Timely, unprecedented support from several Minnesota foundations and hundreds of donors from across the country (including several who made donations in honor of Mr. Donald J. Trump), enabled the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) to hire critical support – two new attorneys who will be able to do life-changing work for Minnesota’s immigrants and refugees.

Meet Julia Decker

Julia Decker first joined ILCM as a full-time, one-year Robina Public Interest Fellow in 2014, shortly after her graduation from the University of Minnesota Law School. During this year at ILCM, she joined a team of lawyers from ILCM, the Center for New Americans, and Faegre Baker Daniels who appealed a removal case up to the U.S. Supreme Court and won in 2015. After her fellowship year, she went back to the University of Minnesota Law School for two years of teaching immigration law and supervising law students representing immigrants and refugees in their immigration cases. Now she is back as an ILCM Community Defense Project staff attorney to provide full representation in removal defense cases and provide Know Your Rights presentations in the community.

Julia is excited to be back with ILCM, advocating for Minnesota’s immigrants and refugees both in court and in the community. She grew up in St. Louis Park and brings a lifetime of engagement with issues of concern to immigrant communities in Minnesota. She speaks Spanish and Mandarin, as well as English.

Meet Margaret Martin

Margaret Martin comes to her position as ILCM’s new Legal Director from New York City, where she served as Director of the Unaccompanied Minors Department at Catholic Charities. Before that, she was a clinical law professor for five years in the Immigration and International Human Rights Clinic at Seton Hall University, and in the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Connecticut. She also worked with the American Bar Association in Uzbekistan and in a clerkship with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of Boston University and the Columbia University School of Law. Her focus on human rights issues emerged early. “I think that protecting the rights of immigrants is one of the most important civil rights issues of our time,” she says.

Since moving here, Margaret has made time to check out her new neighborhood in Minneapolis. She has already used the Midtown Greenway to bike to work, and gone on an inaugural run around the lakes. She says, “it’s a beautiful city.”

As requests for legal presentations and representation more than doubled since November’s election, ILCM has been working overtime to meet increased needs for support and representation. As Julia and Margaret hit the ground running, they are already making a big contribution to meeting those needs.

Legal assistant Gail Martinson works full-time on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — DACA at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM). Since 2012, she has helped more than 1,200 Minnesota DREAMers apply for DACA status or renewal, and other ILCM staff and volunteers have helped even more DACA applicants. With DACA approaching its fifth anniversary on June 15, she recalls helping some clients apply for the DACA status, then apply for renewal two years later, and then apply for a second renewal.

To understand DACA, imagine growing up in Minneapolis, going to school, playing softball and soccer at the park, and dreaming of college one day. Then, when you are fifteen and eager for drivers’ ed classes, you discover that you are different. You don’t have a social security number. You find out your family’s big secret: you and your parents are undocumented. They brought you across the border when you were three years old. Because you are undocumented, you cannot get a drivers’ license. You cannot legally work. You cannot go to college. If the immigration police find you, you will be sent back to a country you do not know at all. And there is no way to fix this.

For hundreds of thousands of young people who came to the United States as children, that was life before DACA. They called themselves DREAMers, as in the American Dream, the dream that they shared but that was legally out of reach.

One of Gail Martinson’s early clients was valedictorian of her class, “a brilliant mind who just had to stop.”

“Her educational life was over because she couldn’t go to college,”  Gail recalls. “She was out of school for two or three years before DACA and now she has been able to re-enroll in school.”

Before DACA, Gail says, “So many kids – especially young men – just dropped out. There was no reason to graduate from high school. DACA has given these kids a reason to stay in school and graduate.”

The DREAMers organized and asked Congress to pass the DREAM Act, to give them a path to legal residence and citizenship. They explained, over and over, that they felt Minnesotan, or Iowan, or Californian, that they felt American. Congress would not listen.

So, in 2012, President Barack Obama established DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals —by executive order. While only Congress can make laws establishing routes to permanent legal residence, the president’s executive order granted some protection for DREAMers. Deferred action is a use of prosecutorial discretion, not a grant of lawful status.. Deferred action means a promise that, even though the government could prosecute and deport a DREAMer, it would not do so — at least for a specific period of time, for those who went through the application and screening process and paid hundreds of dollars in fees.

On June 15, 2012, the Department of Homeland Security announced the rules for DACA — undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before the age of 16, had resided in the U.S. since June 2007 and met other requirements could request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years. In 2014, DHS announced rules for a two-year renewal, and in 2016, for another two-year renewal. More than 750,000 young people applied for and received DACA protection.

In a survey of ILCM clients, DREAMers described the life-changing impact:

I feel that I can now live a better life. I am able to work legally and I think that DACA almost takes a load off your shoulders. Personally, I don’t have to feel ashamed when I apply for a job now. DACA has made me a more confident, empowered individual.

DACA has had a positive impact on my life. Before, I didn’t make enough money and was worried about how I would provide for my family. Thanks to DACA, I was able to obtain my GED. After that, I took a nursing assistant course and a trained medication aide course. I passed both and found out I enjoy helping people. As a result, I took another course and I am now an Emergency Medical Technician.  I will be working in the ambulances saving lives and that has inspired me to achieve more. My next goal is to be a paramedic or something else in the medical field. Without DACA, this would have been impossible.

DACA has provided me hope that even though I’m from a minority, a higher education is still something I can acquire. To me it’s the proof that the United States of America is one of the countries that allows immigrants to have an opportunity to become successful and improves our way of life.

What happens to DACA now, with a new and hostile administration in Washington? Nobody knows for sure. Revocations of DACA status and deportations of DACA recipients have risen sharply. (Read Jessica Colotl’s story here.) President Trump has said different things at different times, sometimes threatening to end DACA entirely and sometimes saying DACA recipients “shouldn’t be worried.

In 2012, almost two-thirds of U.S. adults supported DACA, and public support remains strong.

The current DACA executive order runs out next year. If Trump wants to keep DACA, he will need to issue a new executive order extending the program by June 15, 2018.

UPDATE: On June 15, the fifth anniversary of DACA, the Department of Homeland Security said that, “The June 15, 2012 memorandum that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will remain in effect.”  The same DHS memorandum officially rescinded DAPA and DACA+, saying that “there is no credible path forward to litigate the currently enjoined policy.” For details, see DACA will stay, but administration says no to DAPA, expanded DACA.

 

The Trump administration appealed the Fourth Circuit’s preliminary injunction against Trump’s travel ban to the U.S. Supreme Court. Under normal timing, the Supreme Court would decide whether to hear the case at all, and neither that decision nor actual arguments on the case would happen until after the Court’s summer recess.

Instead, the Trump administration is asking for an expedited ruling, before the Court’s summer recess. The appeal also asks the Supreme Court to order:

1. A stay of the Fourth Circuit preliminary injunction against the travel ban until after the review is heard;
2. A stay of the Hawaii Federal District Court preliminary injunction against the travel ban and refugee ban parts of the executive order. (The district court order was mostly affirmed by the Ninth Circuit after the Trump motion was filed.)

If the Supreme Court granted both of these requests, the travel ban would go into effect some time in June. That is also problematic, argues Marty Lederman, a constitutional law scholar currently at Georgetown University, who previously served as a Deputy Attorney General. According to Lederman, the executive order set the term of the travel ban at 90 days, and that means it would expire before the Court returned from its summer recess:

“Section 2(c) of the Order provides that “the entry into the United States of nationals of [the six designated] countries be suspended for 90 days from the effective date of this order.”  And Section 14 of the Order specifically provides that the “effective date” of the Order was 12:01 a.m. on March 16.  Accordingly, the E.O. itself provides that the suspension prescribed in Section 2(c) ends at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, June 14, whether or not any courts have enjoined its implementation in the interim.”

The Supreme Court has two options at this point:

1. It could agree to hear the appeal, and grant the stays of the lower court injunctions. If it did this, the travel ban would go into effect but, no matter how the time is counted, would expire before a Supreme Court hearing on the case some time after October 1;
2. It could agree to hear the appeal, but deny the stays. That would leave the lower court injunctions in place until the next Supreme Court term.

This all seems a lot like inside baseball, but if you want to follow the story further, here are some places to start:

• One more court says no to Trump travel ban (Immigration News blog, 6/12/17)
• Trump administration to Supreme Court: Give us travel ban now, rule on it later (Vox, 6/2/17)
• The Supreme Court’s Options in the Travel Ban Case (New York Times, 6/2/17)
• Trump turns to Supreme Court to move forward on travel ban (Washington Post, 6/2/17)
• Trump Administration Lawyers Urge Supreme Court to Bring Back His Revised Travel Plan (Los Angeles Times, 6/1/17)
• A simple reason to deny cert. in Trump v. IRAP: because the entry ban expires in 12 days, anyway
• More on the Effective Date of the Entry Ban and the Hawaii Injunction (Response to Will Baude) (Just Security blog, 6/3/17)

Every two years, Congress huffs and puffs about immigration reform. Every two years, it does nothing. Although everybody acknowledges that the U.S. immigration system is broken, the last major immigration legislation was passed in 1996. That legislation was more about deportation and punishment than reform.

Piecemeal proposals now before Congress now echo failures of the past, like the foolish and punitive Davis-Oliver Act, HR2431, which failed to pass in 2013 and 2015. The Trump budget proposes withholding funding for jurisdictions that do not help enforce immigration laws. Aimed at “sanctuary cities,” the provision would codify an anti-sanctuary executive order that has already been halted by the courts. The budget also calls for funding more immigration officers, more border patrol officers, and more jail cells for immigrants. Like all presidential budgets, this one is a wish list, with not much likely to pass as proposed.

Competing interests want different fixes to various temporary worker programs, such as scaling back the H-1B visa program for highly skilled technical workers, protecting undocumented farm workers with a “blue card,” protecting veterans from deportation, and doing something to change the investor visa.

Some of these bills might pass. Most will not. None of them offers anything like the comprehensive immigration reform that is needed to fix this broken system.

The biggest changes in immigration come not from Congress, but from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport as many people as possible, regardless of family ties, length of residence in the United States, good character, or humanitarian considerations. The new policy is to “take the shackles off” ICE and Border Patrol agents, removing any limits on who is targeted for immediate deportation. Early on, the New York Times reported:

“But for those with ICE badges, perhaps the biggest change was the erasing of the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities, which forced agents to concentrate on deporting gang members and other violent and serious criminals, and mostly leave everyone else alone….

“Two officials in Washington said that the shift — and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming ‘fun.’ Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said.”

This change of direction seems larger than anything Congress is likely to do.

 

 

Minnesota REAL ID was one of the first orders of business that the state legislature worked on this session and one of the last bills signed into law. The federal REAL ID act, signed by President Bush in 2005, requires proof of U.S. citizenship for a ‘compliant’ license that can be used as identification to enter some federal buildings and board flights. Thirteen states also provide for a second kind of license, ‘non-compliant’ licenses that are available to all residents regardless of citizenship status.

Minnesota is one of the last states to bring its own licenses into compliance. ILCM and advocates knew that the issue that stalled the bill in 2016, licenses for the undocumented, would once again be in play this year. This year’s fight over adopting REAL ID included a protracted debate around granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The key issue of disagreement between the House and the Senate versions of the REAL ID bill was the immigration issue. The House bill required proof of legal status for receiving any Minnesota driver’s license, while the Senate version effectively did the same by preventing the Department of Public Safety from changing its rules on requirements for a license.  This anti-rulemaking provision sought to move the current prohibition on driver’s licenses from administrative rules into a harder-to-change statute.

The House approved their version 72 to 58, mostly along party lines. The Senate, however, failed to pass their bill, with the restrictive language, by a 29-32 vote. The Senate brought back the bill without the anti-immigrant language and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

A conference committee was called to work out the difference and after several meetings, it eventually passed a clean REAL ID bill that did not restrict rulemaking on licenses for immigrants. The governor signed that bill.

Unfortunately, the fight wasn’t over: it had simply moved elsewhere. At what seemed like the last minute of the legislative session, language restricting driver’s licenses for immigrants was inserted into the public safety omnibus funding bill. The regular session ended without agreement on most spending bills and the anti-immigrant language was now included in the global debate about public safety, judiciary funding and the possibility of a government shutdown. Ultimately, as part of an agreement to avoid a government shutdown, the anti-rulemaking, anti-immigrant language became part of the global budget negotiations and was signed into law by the governor.

That may not be the end of the story. Immigrant leaders and community members ultimately spent the final week of the session protesting the bill and sought a veto from the Governor, all to no avail. While Governor Dayton signed the omnibus funding bills, he line-item vetoed funding for the House and Senate, essentially forcing legislators to come back for further negotiations if they want to continue to be paid. One of his explicit demands is a removal of the anti-immigrant language from the Omnibus Public Safety bill. After meeting with leaders from the community and ILCM’s executive director, Dayton also promised to  continue to meet with immigrant community leaders and committed his Administration to doing everything it can to protect immigrants over the remainder of his term.

Throughout this entire process, your phone calls and messages to legislators urging support of immigrants and their families made a real difference. One legislator told me they’d received 15 calls about REAL ID in just one morning! More than 300 calls were made via Action Alerts from ILCM, and probably at least as many more by people who made calls but did not report them on the page.

While we are obviously disappointed with the final outcome, we are hopeful that some new opportunities arose to help build a more welcoming state and to build on-going support to restore driver’s licenses for all in the near future. ILCM and the immigrant community thank each of you for your efforts and support. The fight to make Minnesota a welcoming state for all people is going strong and we are in it together. If you aren’t already receiving our Action Alerts, sign up here and follow us on Facebook.

by Nick Rea, Advocacy & Policy Intern

On Mother’s Day, Ricardo Levins Morales filmed an MTC officer asking Ariel Vences-Lopez about his immigration status. That’s not supposed to happen, but it did. Later, Vences-Lopez was arrested and tasered, then held in custody by the Hennepin County Sheriff, then turned over to immigration officials. As of June 12, when this article was written, an emergency stay of removal had been granted while the immigration court considers motions submitted by his attorneys. Vences-Lopez is represented by Danielle Robinson Briand in the immigration proceeding and another attorney is representing him in the Hennepin County court proceedings.

MTC has said the officer had no business asking about immigration status, that this is not their policy or practice.

“This afternoon, community members and partners alerted me to a situation in which one of my part time officers was witnessed asking an individual whether he was in the state illegally. I immediately called for an Internal Affairs investigation to gather the details about this incident and to report back to me as quickly as possible.

“It is not the practice of the Metro Transit police to inquire about the immigration status of our riders. …”

The officer who questioned Vences-Lopez resigned from the MTC, where he worked part-time, but is still employed as a full-time police officer in New Hope.

The MTC officer asking about legal status was only the first violation of policy and practice – Vences-Lopez was held in secret, his name was “redacted” from the MTC arrest report, and inquiries about the case were stalled, evaded, or just not answered. According to the Pioneer Press, which followed the story closely, officials said that the report contained all the information that would be released. When the newspaper pressed MTC to identify the specific provision of the state Data Privacy Act that authorized hiding the name of the person arrested, they conferred with attorneys and then finally released his name.

A carefully documented blog post by Tony Webster, who identifies himself as a “web engineer, public records researcher, and policy nerd,” raises important questions, including:

“Surely the Chief knew his officer had tasered the young man and booked him into jail, so why did the public find out for the first time on May 24 that he went to jail, and on May 25 that he was tasered?

“Was the arrest record suppressed from public view, or was it just a coincidence of timing? Is there a policy on when arrests are suppressed from the jail roster and the reasons why an arrest can be manually suppressed?”

Webster included links to the official statements from the MTC and Hennepin County Sheriff in his blog post on May 27, observing:

 “Neither statement addresses the full gamut of questions, nor details the timeline in how Metro Transit addressed the controversy. The statements said Metro Transit found out the man was in ICE custody because a Pioneer Press reporter told them so, late Friday night. Chair Duininck said prior to learning of the deportation order, the agency was working on possibly placing the Metro rider in a diversion program or having charges dropped.

“Both statements seemed to imply Metro Transit was given false information, perhaps by officials at the Hennepin County jail. Chief Harrington stated, “we understood that Vences-Lopez had been released from the custody of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office,” and Chair Duininck said, “At the time we were told the rider had been released from custody, he had actually been in ICE custody for nearly a week.” The statements promised to look into why the agency was allegedly given inaccurate information, and promised to uncover “what went wrong.”

 

Read the rest of the story here: MTC and immigration video: The rest of the story

Ricardo Levins-Morales was returning home on May 14, exhausted from a long trip and eager to get home. On the Blue Line train from the airport, he saw an MTC officer interrogating a fellow passenger. He recalls thinking that “maybe this wasn’t going to be routine,” aware of “how quickly and easily police interactions can escalate.” So he fumbled in his backpack for his phone, turned it on and started filming.

Levins-Morales called out the officer on his questions about immigration status. The officer seemed to back down as a result of his question. Then the train arrived at 38th Street, and everyone had to get off and take a bus, because of weekend work on the line. In the confusion, Levins-Morales lost sight of the young man. He saw one on the two transit officers, now by himself, and “made the mistake of assuming that the young man had gotten free.”

Later in the week, he posted the video, which has gone viral, with millions of views around the world. That led to an investigation by the Pioneer Press, revealing that the Ariel Vences-Lopez had not gotten free, but had been tasered, arrested, and turned over to ICE to be deported.

Though the video did not get Vences-Lopez free, it had far-reaching impact.

“I’ve gotten people responding to me on Facebook, saying, ‘Now I know what to do in a situation like that,” Levins-Morales says. “It’s important that the impulse be to intervene to try to shift the balance of power at the moment, but there’s no template for what’s right in any given moment.

“When I spoke up, the cop first looked at my face and then glanced down and saw the phone — I’m sure that made a difference in his response. So if my phone wasn’t working or had bene out of charge, even that would have helped to give a little more leverage in the moment to try to interrupt what was going on.

“It’s not the tools that are important — it’s the understanding that you need to quickly reach for an appropriate tool, and that might change, depending on circumstances.”

The video also led to action from the Met Council and MTC. As an internal investigation began, the police officer resigned his MTC job. MTC police chief John Harrington strongly reiterated MTC policy against any questions about immigration status.

 

For more of the story, read Cell phone video caught MTC officer asking immigration status – the rest of the story still unfolding

 

The Ninth Circuit ruling gave an additional rationale for finding the travel ban illegitimate: it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibition against discrimination on the basis of nationality, which meant Trump “exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress.”

The unanimous ruling also allows the Trump administration to proceed with internal studies of security measures — which gives the Supreme Court even less reason to expedite its own consideration of the case, or to stay the 4th and 9th Circuit rulings.

“But history may record this term as a blockbuster in one area that has become eerily relevant to America in 2017: how much due process is owed to immigrants, undocumented aliens, aliens outside the United States—and even naturalized citizens. In this area, no fewer than eight cases remain to be announced. The Court granted review in most of them before the election, when they seemed legally important but not overwhelmingly so. But in the surreal post-election era of Donald Trump—the era of the deportation force, mass immigrant roundups, expanding detention of allegedly unlawful immigrants, and hypertrophy of the Department of Homeland Security’s already overgrown enforcement apparatus–they may, together, become literal matters of life and death.  “

Advocates including the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) are fighting back against the Department of Justice (DOJ) attempt to limit immigrant access to non-profit legal assistance. In April, the DOJ sent a warning letter to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) in Seattle, telling the organization to “cease and desist” from assisting immigrants in deportation proceedings unless NWIRP has entered a formal notice of representation with the immigration court.

A brief in support of NWIRP (called an “amicus brief”) was submitted by more than a dozen legal assistance organizations, including ILCM. The amicus brief describes why immigrants need advice and assistance even if lawyers cannot commit to full representation:

“A day in any immigration court in America would be an enlightening experience for most U.S. citizens, including for much of the bar. Respondent after respondent pleads for a continuance to find a lawyer. Shackled detainees ask anyone in a suit for a card. Detainees who have run out of continuances stare blankly at an overworked judge who asks the most basic questions, or they ask for help understanding a form, or they unknowingly provide incomplete responses that seal their fate.”

Immigration courts have no public defenders. Immigrants in deportation proceedings have lawyers only if they can afford them. Non-profit organizations offer some help, but they do not have enough capacity to represent everyone. Even if immigrants have money, they often cannot find a qualified immigration attorney, especially in detention centers that are far from major cities.

In its cease and desist letter to NWIRP, DOJ objected to a situation in which an attorney from NWIRP helped with a motion to reopen drafted on behalf of a woman and her two children. NWIRP did not have an attorney available to take the case for representation, which would take hundreds of hours, and so the attorney instead offered advice and limited help in drafting the motion. The attorney noted this assistance on the court documents. And the woman desperately needed help: she spoke Mam (a Mayan language), waited for months for a credible-fear interview that never happened, and then missed her hearing because of a mistranslation of her hearing notice.

Because full representation on an immigration case is enormously time-consuming, NWIRP, ILCM, and other non-profit legal organizations often provide advice and education, multiplying their effectiveness and assisting many more people than can be helped through representation alone. As noted in the amicus brief,

“Some amici organize workshops to teach general immigration concepts to immigrants or attorneys; some help answer questions on forms such as the I-589 asylum application; some provide templates for petitions, motions, and briefs; and some help draft documents that a pro se litigant will file in immigration court.”

While this assistance is not as helpful as full representation, the amicus brief noted that “the ideal that all persons in immigration proceedings have full-scope legal representation is a far cry from reality.”

These strategies for delivering help to as many immigrants as possible are exactly what the Trump DOJ’s cease-and-desist letter threaten. The interpretation that DOJ sets forth in its letter could prevent tens of thousands of immigrants from getting individualized legal advice and assistance.

Immigration court judges know that this assistance is valuable. The amicus brief quoted former Immigration Judge Eliza Klein:

“Without the assistance of these non-profit organizations, there is a real danger that people with valid asylum claims will not seek relief or may not present their claim in such a way that the judge will understand the validity of the claim. Even when they are able to present their case, if they have had no prior assistance in filling out forms, writing statements and obtaining supporting evidence, the amount of time the court must dedicate to the case (both in questioning the Respondent about unexplored avenues of relevant information and in continuing a case to obtain evidence) is greatly increased. In essence, by preventing these organizations from assisting asylum seekers in preparing their applications, EOIR would deprive asylum applicants of the “full and fair hearing” to which they are entitled.”

Federal District Court Judge Richard Jones (Seattle) found that NWIRP “is likely to succeed on the claims that entitle it to relief,” and that granting a temporary restraining order “is in the public interest.” He issued a nationwide temporary restraining order against the Department of Justice on May 17, ordering that the DOJ not attempt to enforce the cease-and-desist letter against NWIRP, or against any non-profit organizations that provide legal services, while the court considers NWIRP’s request for a preliminary injunction.

 

For more information, see:

• The Airport Lawyers Who Stood Up to Trump Are Under Attack (The Nation,5/19/17)
• Seattle Judge Rules Justice Department Can’t Limit Legal Assistance to Immigrants (YES! Magazine, 5/18/17)
• Federal Judge Blocks Restriction on Immigrant Legal Help (Honolulu Star Advertiser, 5/17/17)
• Mtn. for Leave to File Amicus (Ex. A – Proposed Amicus Brief w Exhibits)…
• NWIRP Cease and Desist 4-5-17
• 2017-05-17 Order Granting TRO
• NWIRP challenges order from Department o fJustice to cease and desist providing legal assistance to unrepresented individuals in deportation proceedings (NWIRP)