How Sessions Is Making an Overstretched Deportation System Even Less Fair

Sessions’ ban on administrative closure means that husbands and wives of U.S. citizens awaiting permanent residency could be ripped away from their spouses before they can complete the process. It could mean people not mentally competent to participate in their deportation proceedings could be forced to move forward anyway. And unaccompanied children seeking special protective status could be sent back to dangerous situations before their backlogged visas are available.

The attorney general’s decision to wipe out administrative closure will also contribute to the already massive backlog of more than 700,000 immigration cases, further squeezing the courts and undercutting immigrants’ opportunities to fairly present their claims. Immigration courts are already overburdened and lack important procedural protections. But they have to make critical, sometimes life-or-death decisions about whether immigrants — many of them asylum seekers fleeing persecution or Dreamers with deep roots in their communities — will be admitted or exiled. As Immigration Judge Dana Leigh Marks has put it, immigration courts are already “doing death-penalty cases in a traffic-court setting.” But with this administration’s policy changes, even that traffic court is turning into a kangaroo court. Mistakes and due process violations will inevitably result.

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This is just one of many changes Sessions is imposing to make immigration procedures less fair. He is planning to weigh in on an immigration case that could make it much harder to get a “continuance” — another important tool in immigration judges’ toolkit that allows immigrants more time to get a lawyer, prepare their case, or await the outcome of an immigration application. And earlier this year, Sessions’ Department of Justice announced that it would be putting in place ambitious case completion goals on immigration courts and imposing quotas on individual immigration judges.

Which is an insult to the son of Belladonna Took, but also… funny.

Justice Dept. Drops a Key Objection to a Texas Voter ID Law

By MANNY FERNANDEZ and ERIC LICHTBLAU FEB. 27, 2017

The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country in 2011, requiring voters to show a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot.

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Opponents of the law said Republican lawmakers selected IDs that were most advantageous for Republican-leaning white voters and discarded IDs that were beneficial to Democratic-leaning minority voters.

But the Justice Department under President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions sought on Monday to drop the claim that Texas enacted the law with a discriminatory intent, according to lawyers for the minority groups and voters who also sued Texas and are the Justice Department’s fellow plaintiffs in the case.

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The Justice Department would be essentially dropping its accusation that the state was motivated by racial bias in enacting the voter ID law, but preserving its claim that the law had a discriminatory impact on minority voters, the lawyers said.

The Justice Department remains a party in the case but will most likely play a smaller role.

The case will proceed, because the numerous parties that sued Texas — including voters, elected officials, civil rights organizations and black and Hispanic advocacy groups — will continue the lawsuit.

Justice Dept. Drops a Key Objection to a Texas Voter ID Law

Read the letter Coretta Scott King wrote opposing Sessions’s 1986 federal nomination

tpfnews:

The widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. urged Congress to block the 1986 nomination of Jeff Sessions for federal judge, saying that allowing him to join the federal bench would “irreparably damage the work of my husband,” according to the letter written by King that was previously publicly unavailable and obtained on Tuesday by The Post.

(Read the full letter below)

“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts,” King wrote in the cover page of her 9-page letter opposing Sessions’s nomination, which failed at the time.

“Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.”

Thirty years later, Sessions, now himself a senator, is again undergoing confirmation hearings as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and is facing fierce opposition from civil rights groups.

In the letter, King writes that Sessions’s ascension to the federal bench “simply cannot be allowed to happen,” arguing that as a U.S. attorney, the Alabama lawmaker perused “politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions” and that he “lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” She said Sessions’s conduct in prosecuting civil rights leaders in a voting fraud case “raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens.”

“The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given a life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods,” she wrote, later adding: “I believe his confirmation would have a devastating effect on not only the judicial system in Alabama, but also on the progress we have made toward fulfilling my husband’s dream.”

During the 1986 hearing, the letter and King’s opposition became a crucial part of the argument against Sessions’s confirmation. Current Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has not previously released the letter, which committee rules grant him the sole authority to reveal.

Buzzfeed News first reported the existence of the letter earlier Tuesday, noting that it was never entered into the congressional record by then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond.

The full letter:

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Read the letter Coretta Scott King wrote opposing Sessions’s 1986 federal nomination