Christine Flowers: There’s a wholesale inhumanity happening now in immigration courts

Whenever I post something about a person who has been granted asylum, or who has obtained their green card, or who has become a U.S. citizen, people congratulate that person, and say “welcome to the country.”

Many of the comments are incredibly warm, and they make me very proud of the work that I do.

And then there are the people who always manage to put a damper on the celebration by saying “Thank you for doing it the right way.”

I think in their own minds, they are being kind and complimentary. They are saying this person, my client, has followed the rules and honored our country by not taking advantage of its benefits.

But they have no idea how offensive it sounds, especially in this day and age.

Over the last few months, shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump, I have noticed a sea change in the way we treat people who are, in fact, doing it “the right way.”

People who have applied for asylum either at the border, or after they lawfully entered the U.S., have been picked up at regular check-ins with ICE, detained without explanation, denied any sort of bond and essentially pressured into seeking deportation.

The government doesn’t have to apply too much pressure to a person who is living in a jail cell with four other strangers, allowed one shower a week, eating subpar food, and cut off from communication with their families and in some cases, even their attorneys.

If you think I am exaggerating, that is your right.

I don’t have space to document my numerous visits to detention centers like Moshannon and Pike in Pennsylvania, Elizabeth and Delaney Hall in New Jersey, Oakdale in Louisiana, Batavia in New York and a few in Texas.

They differ only in the accents of the guards. The climate, the attitudes and the outcomes are identical.

I don’t have space to describe the calls I’ve been receiving from desperate people who, last year, would have qualified for bond and this year are disappeared into some privately owned and operated facility that is making its owners quite wealthy.

The immigration judges are also changing. When I started practicing in this field over 30 years ago, these men and women carried themselves as if they were independent adjudicators of right and wrong, legal and illegal, just and unfair.

They were always a part of the executive branch, which meant that they were not like Article III federal judges who were insulated from the politics of the White House, but they liked to think of themselves as neutral and unbiased, men and women who did not work on a time clock, did not worry about quotas, did not rush through cases to please the man in the Oval Office, and who really did care about the accuracy and just nature of their decisions.

Some of them are still in that mold. I have had the great privilege of practicing before people like that, including a few who recently granted asylum to deserving clients. One of them was so sad that he had to deny a case that he basically apologized to the clients, understanding his obligation to the law but not forgetting his humanity.

But the majority are either afraid of being fired because they are not satisfying the demands of their immediate boss, Pam Bondi, or they find themselves in the rhetorical cross hairs of her boss, Trump.

These are people who are now forced to hear four cases a day, complicated applications from victims of political and social violence, and to render a fair and unbiased decision for each of them in a very short period of time.

Gay men from Pakistan. Political dissidents from Venezuela. Abused girlfriends of Salvadoran gang members.

Imagine having to determine the outcome of someone’s life in the span of a Netflix film. It weighs on you, especially in this climate.

I suppose the point of this column is not to convince anyone that the current immigration system is unfair, broken and in many cases cruel. Some of my readers already believe that, some never will, and some might accept this as the result of years of mistakes made by Presidents Biden and Obama.

But the real mistakes made by Trump’s predecessors do not justify the wholesale inhumanity that I see happening today in courts and offices in my city and elsewhere.

It does not justify upending lives because someone in D.C. decided that we needed to bully people into giving up their right to asylum, and that quotas were more important than integrity.

I am nearing retirement, and yet I won’t be retiring. I am going to see us through the next few years of mayhem, of not having a “right way to do it,” for as long as I can stand in front of a judge and say “Your honor, this individual deserves our protection.”

And if you have made it this far, you have my thanks.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times.