19th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference

AGENDA

9:00 a.m. ET

Morning Keynote & Welcoming Remarks
Keynote Speaker: The Hon. William Tong, Attorney General, State of Connecticut

9:45 a.m. ET

An Unsettled Landscape: The State of Play for Immigration in an Era of Growing Executive Action and State Involvement 
Following an administration that had arguably been the most activist yet on immigration, President Joe Biden had outpaced his predecessor in the issuance of executive actions that touch many corners of the immigration system—from major changes to the processing of border asylum cases and immigration enforcement priorities to more modest efforts, such as adjusting how immigration cases are processed. Yet the Biden agenda on immigration had been stymied by opposition from red-state politicians who have turned to the courts and otherwise asserted a more muscular role, rising encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border that have reduced the political space for other action, and a Congress that continued to remain unable to pass legislation on even modest fixes widely recognized as necessary.

As of 2022, what was the Biden record on immigration? What was the state of play as both political parties near a highly consequential mid-term election? And what challenges lay ahead as growing humanitarian protection needs, continuing pressure at the southwest border, and legal immigration narrowed by processing backlogs add complexity to an already fraught policy arena? A panel of veteran policy and political analysts and a journalist traded insights during this wide-ranging conversation.

• Moderator: Doris Meissner, Senior Fellow and Director, U.S. Immigration Policy Program, Migration Policy Institute (MPI)
• Speakers:
  • T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Director, Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, and University Professor, The New School; former Deputy UN High Commissioner for Refugees
  • Caitlin Dickerson, Staff Writer, The Atlantic
  • Jorge Lima, Vice President, Immigration and Economic Progress, Stand Together; Senior Vice President, Policy, Americans for Prosperity
  • Simon Rosenberg, President, NDN

11:00 a.m. ET  -   Break

11:15 a.m. ET

Reshaping the Asylum System at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Providing access to asylum for arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border has long been hampered by a U.S. asylum system in crisis. More complexity was added with the implementation of the pandemic-era Title 42 border expulsions policy that has denied the basic right to apply for asylum for many and litigation around the Migrant Protection Protocols (aka Remain in Mexico) program begun under the Trump administration and continued during the Biden presidency.

In 2022, the Biden administration advanced and began implementing a new asylum system that it contended will make the processing of asylum cases fairer and reduce some of the years-long delays that neither serve the interests of humanitarian protection nor effective migration management. How was the final rule that establishes the new system affecting practices at the border and within the executive branch? How were some of the criticisms being addressed? What would a post-Title 42 enforcement regime entail? And what was the status of the MPP program?

• Moderator: Andrew I. Schoenholtz, Professor from Practice, Georgetown Law; Co-Director, Center for Applied Legal Studies; Faculty Director, Human Rights Institute, Georgetown Law
• Speakers:
  • Jennifer B. Higgins, Deputy Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
  • Sara Ramey, Executive Director, Migrant Center for Human Rights

  • Philip G. Schrag, Co-Director, Center for Applied Legal Studies and Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law, Georgetown Law

    Show full transcript

    This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

     

     

    [00:00:07.18] - Andrew I. Schoenholtz

    To our panel today. During the last two conferences, we discussed border policies created by the Trump administration, including MPP, Remain in Mexico, and the Title 42 exclusions. The Biden administration continued enforcing Title 42 for some time, and also placed many asylum seekers into regular immigration court removal proceedings. In June, the administration started to pilot new border asylum procedures where asylum officers, rather than immigration judges, make the initial asylum decision. To discuss this new system and to consider other border asylum issues, we have three experts whose bios you can find in the program. So I'll be really brief because I want you to hear from them. Sara Ramey is the Executive Director of the Migrant Center for Human Rights located in South Texas. Philip Schrag is the Co-Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies and the Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law here at Georgetown Law. And Jennifer Higgins is the Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services And we're particularly grateful to Jennifer for rescheduling her travel today just to be with— just to join us. She will be leaving as soon as our panel is over. Sara, why don't you start off by sharing your knowledge and perspective from the border area?

     

    Then we'll hear from Philip and Jennifer.

     

     

    [00:01:39.21] - Sara Ramey

    Thank you, Andy, and thank you to Georgetown, to the Migration Policy Institute, and of course to CLINIC for hosting this event and for inviting us. To share our experience with working with asylum seekers at the southern border. The question that I think is the fundamental underlying question of today, at least for this panel, is how do we as a country ensure that we're following our asylum laws, our international treaty obligations, the U.S. Constitution, and our fundamental American values in the most efficient and humane way possible? Unfortunately, I've seen over the last few days in relation to reporting on the flights to Martha's Vineyard and other matters, a pretty significant misunderstanding of how cases are processed at the border. Considering this is also a mixed audience with people varying expertise, I wanted to briefly go through the 4 major types of case processing that we see at the southern border. The first form of case processing is where Customs and Border Patrol will parole individuals into the United States. That basically means they've conducted a background check, determined the person has no criminal history, and will issue them a notice to appear in immigration court to determine whether or not they have a legal way of staying in the US.

     

    Those individuals are often pregnant women, individuals with young children, and others that CBP determines are safe to relocate with family and friends here in the U.S. The second group of people are individuals who will be placed in immigration detention. My organization works with the individuals at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas. We are one of the two pilot locations for the rollout of the administration's new interim final rule, which I'll be— which we'll be discussing in more detail in a minute. In 1996, a major immigration reform act was passed known as IIRAIRA, or the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. That set up the expedited removal process, which basically says that if someone has been apprehended within 14 days or within 100 miles of the border, they can be removed without seeing an immigration judge. The exception are for people who claim asylum. Those individuals are scheduled to meet with a USCIS asylum officer to determine whether they have a credible fear. In other words, a significant possibility of winning their case before an immigration judge. If so, they will be placed— issued a notice to appear and placed in Title 240 proceedings.

     

     

     

    [00:04:20.02] - Sara Ramey

    The asylum processing rule that went into force on May 31st of this year specifically changes this process. As we'll be discussing. The two other major policies, as we're all aware, are the MPP policy where people were told they had to wait in dangerous conditions in Mexico for their court hearing, and Title 42, which is the same in the sense of you have to wait in Mexico, you're being expelled to Mexico, not necessarily deported, although that has happened in some cases, and you will not be given a court date or otherwise be processed through USCIS or any other— in any other way have your asylum claim heard. For those of you who read the Washington Post, you probably saw there are numbers of FY22 crossers is higher this fiscal year than in the past year. The actual number for Title 42 is 2,300,308. That's the total number of apprehensions. So the actual number of individuals is about 1,400,000 because these— well, this isn't for 2022. The most recent data from CBP is for 2021. The repeat cross rate has increased recently in the last few years, the last, I would say, 3 years, and is now hovering around 27%.

     

    To about one-third. And so there are 621,000 people of that group that was reported in the Post that are coming for a second or third or in some cases up to 6 times trying to get protection in the United States. So just understand that when you are looking at that number, that's not the number of individuals, that's the number that CBP's interacting with individuals. And I'll just mention real briefly that MPP cases right now are just over 25,000 that are pending out of a total of about 71,000 during the last few years. So I'm going to do— I'm going to ask you all to do a little quick thing for me. And I would like you to start counting off. Just so I'm going to ask for this lady in the back corner with the lovely flower dress. Can you say 1 and then we'll just go 1, 2, 3 down the row?

     

    [00:06:44.06] - Audience

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

     

     

    [00:06:52.08] - Sara Ramey

    33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, Ok, I'm gonna stop there and I'm going to—for the folks that are virtual, we'll pretend like there are 39, 40, 41, 42 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48. Those are the people in the last couple months who would have been granted protection in the United States.

     

    But for the implementation of the new interim final rule according to USCIS statistics. So that represents 11% reversal rate of negative credible fear interviews that are no longer able to happen because of the time limitations that have been implemented. So I will explain how this happens in the next few slides. So USCIS released publicly the first data set at the end of last month. I just want to draw your attention to the positive credible fear findings and the negative credible fear finding numbers. And we have this here on our next slide. So we're looking at a denial rate of credible fear interviews of 47.5% in the reporting period. Now, these include cases where the immigration judge has disagreed with the negative result and has reversed. So the actual CFI denial rate is probably significantly higher than this. I, I haven't been able to do the math, but I'm guessing it's probably about closer to 60%. The denial rate across the board, not for IFR cases, is also fairly high during that reporting period, and that's at 42%. But it is— so it is lower, but it's still high. And you can tell that because if you look at the regular CFI denial rates for the last 2 years, it's significantly lower.

     

    So this, I think, chart very adequately shows that in the last, you know, these are just, this is just under the Biden administration, right? So first year Biden administration, second year Biden administration, we were seeing a huge increase in denials. I will say it's very unclear in practice why this is happening because I haven't noticed any significant change in how the case, who's coming or how the cases are being processed beyond this new rule. So, the Houston Asylum Office that hears cases at our facility as well as the Houston Contract Detention Facility, the other pilot site, is around 60%. This is data from the beginning of the year. Latest data we have to compare nationally, and the national rate, of course, is much higher at 82%. And Human Rights First issued a report recently last week explaining that there were some concerns with how those interviews were being conducted. The issue with the credible fear interviews, why they're so important, one is when you get a positive result, that's now being treated as an asylum application. Basically sworn under oath that's going to form the basis of your request with the immigration judge if you're not approved by the asylum office at asylum merits hearing.

     

    Any errors in the interview that's where you would still get a positive could come back and present credibility issues, and I have seen those result in denials with the judge. Then, of course, erroneous denials would result in people being forcibly returned when they are bona fide refugees, like the 48 people that we estimate have been deported in the last couple months due to the interim final rule. 99% of asylum seekers do not have counsel. Your chances of winning protection in immigration court increase fivefold if you are represented, and the, you know, importance of counsel in understanding the laws and the process can't be understated. And so the— there's various reasons why it's difficult to get counsel and why people have problems presenting their stories to an asylum officer. These interviews take place often within a span of about 2 weeks, sometimes less, which does not give folks the opportunity sometimes to find, much less hire someone. The pro bono list that's provided to individuals is in English. Especially for non-Spanish speakers. So Creole speakers, Lingala speakers, they often sometimes go months or longer without being able to talk to anybody because nobody speaks their language.

     

    And then the meeting circumstances can be very difficult. So attorneys, you know, may not want to travel several hours to meet with someone. Video visitations are limited to 2 per day, 1 hour per person. There's a lack of confidentiality if they call from the dorms. There's issues with them not having free phone calls. And so in addition to this, you know, if you think you've just survived some traumatic experience and you're trying to worry about paying your electric bill, like that's the last thing on the top of your head, right? So a lot of times also because of that being in detention, the stress, the anxiety, the trauma, it makes it very difficult for people to be proactive and figure all this out immediately. Because nobody's told them they need to, right? And then, you know, the other issue is that people really do think that the U.S. is going to protect them. They say, "My life is in serious danger. The U.S. stands for human rights. That's enough." And I can tell you it's not because our laws are much more complicated than one might think. So to give a few examples of issues that people have when they are not represented.

     

    Sometimes they don't feel like they have the ability to stand up to an officer and correct them if they say a mistake. They often will not tell their story in chronological order. They'll start with what's most important to them and they move around the story. That gets confusing for the officers and things get skipped because of that. They don't give certain details that can be very crucial. So in the example, that I give to people I talk to them. You know, the person got a positive CFI. They said they talked to their mom a year ago. And then when they got to the judge, they said they talked to their mom 6 months ago. And the judge said, "What's going on? You're lying to me or you're lying to the officer." And that was the end of the story. And they were denied. And the situation was the person just didn't say, "Well, I talked to my mom in person a year ago when I was in my country. And the last time I talked to her by phone was 6 months ago before I crossed the border and got put in detention." And so just those little lacks of detail create huge problems for people.

     

    There's cultural differences where people might feel uncomfortable, like it's inappropriate to say certain things. And then there's a lot of concern, especially recently with folks who are fleeing from dictatorships in Nicaragua, Venezuela, et cetera, that reporting to a government office or some of like problems against another government, that information wouldn't necessarily be kept confidential. And there, because their interactions with their corrupt police officers and their corrupt officials is not the same as what it would be here, but they just don't have that level of confidence. What is the result of this? Well, there is a review process with an immigration judge and you can see in the last couple years that the ability of, or the number I should say, of judges reversing negative CFIs has actually increased. We're seeing an increase in denials and we're also seeing an increase of judges saying, hey, that's that's an incorrect decision. The reality is, I think by and large in my interactions with USCIS, the officers are trying to do a good job, but they're also human beings and they're fallible. So when I'm meeting with somebody, the first time I meet with them, I don't get the full story.

     

    I'll get the full story later on after meeting with them a second time or a third time and the trust is built and I go, oh wait, I forgot that question. This is really important for us to talk about in more detail. So the IJs are reversing about 32% of the time. And you know, this is important checks and balances system. Our, you know, issue here is, are the immigration judges always correct? And we know that they aren't, otherwise we wouldn't have a Board of Immigration Appeals, federal courts, and the Supreme Court ultimately to look at cases. So the asylum— so the new interim final processing rule has limited the request for reconsideration process to 7 days and is only allowing one of those requests. So if an individual filed a letter pro se, as an attorney, I wouldn't be able to go back and look at that case. And the, you know, the issues with the IJ reviews are very similar to the issues that you have at the CFI. It's a very quick process., and people don't have sort of the ability to, if they're unrepresented, to fully explain their case in many situations.

     

    I'm going to skip the examples here, but I'm happy to talk about more specific issues in Q&A. But in the interest of time, I do want to just show you some data, a couple data points that we have. So this is what we've tracked in the last couple months. Of how long it takes us to get a copy of the file. So this isn't even consulting with somebody or preparing a request for reconsideration. So the only cases where we potentially meet that 7-day deadline are in this very first column, right? The vast majority of people, we don't even have a file to review until after the 7 days have gone by. And then from the time we get that file to when we consult with them, depending on if we do in-house or if we're looking for and referring out to pro bono, also varies. And then this is sort of the total of those two combined. So, you know, we have tracked that, like, we're looking at about a 25% rate of people getting deported before we're even able to talk to them or otherwise get a letter prepared for them. So I'm going to end there, and I'm happy to take any questions later. Thank you.

     

     

    [00:17:06.23] - Andrew I. Schoenholtz

    Thank you very much, Sara. Professor Schrag, would you now share with us what you've learned from your study of the new border asylum system.

     

     

    [00:17:17.24] - Philip G. Schrag

    Thank you, Andy. So when it created this new asylum processing system under the new interim final rule on asylum adjudication in expedited removal cases, the administration claimed that the purpose was to create a new system that was both fair and efficient compared to the current system, or the system before last June, with people waiting more than 4 years for a hearing in the backlogged immigration court system. Many aspects of the new system are laudable. There are some wonderful things about it. Basically, the idea of having asylum officers rather than immigration judges adjudicating asylum claims in the first instance is a terrific idea. It's a, a less expensive procedure for everybody involved.. And appearing in a non-adversarial asylum office interview is a lot less terrifying than appearing before a judge in robes. There are other good aspects of the system too. DHS, Department of Homeland Security, isn't detaining the people in the new system, and it's virtually impossible to prepare a good asylum case from detention. The new system eliminates the need for applicants for asylum to file a complicated asylum application because a positive credible fear determination is deemed to be an asylum application. There is no 1-year deadline problem for people in the new process because the asylum application now being deemed by this process to be the positive credible fear determination happens within a few days or weeks of crossing the border, so there's no one-year deadline problem.

     

    At the asylum office interviews that follow, interpreters are provided at government expense, which is a, a good reform compared to the affirmative asylum process in which people have to bring their own interpreters. Asylum officers are now going to be allowed to make findings on eligibility for withholding of removal and torture convention protection. But the new system has one dreadful flaw in it, and that's what I want to focus on because that's what makes it unfair even though it's efficient. And this is a flaw that I hope will be corrected in final rule when it's finally adopted. The dreadful flaw is the very short, excessively short time limits which prevent asylum seekers from being able to collect the corroborating evidence that they need to win their cases. So what's the schedule? A merits interview with an asylum officer must be held 21 to 45 days after an asylum applicant is notified that she's been determined to have credible fear of persecution. And the supporting evidence for that application for asylum must be filed 7 days before the asylum merits interview with the asylum officer, or 10 days if by mail. Well, most applicants are going to file by mail because they're not necessarily going to be in the same city even as the asylum office to which they will have to report.

     

    So if the interview is scheduled 21 days after notification, the evidence is due 11 days after the credible fear notification. If it takes the applicant 2 days to get released from detention after this notification and 2 days to reach their destination by bus, wherever they're going in the United States to where the interview is going to be held, that leaves only 7 days to collect the evidence. And most applicants will need corroborating evidence because of the REAL ID Act, which says, quote, where the trier of fact determines that the applicant should provide evidence that corroborates otherwise credible testimony, such evidence must be provided unless the applicant does not have the evidence and could not reasonably obtain the evidence. So what is— what are we talking about? Collecting corroborating evidence usually requires the assistance of counsel. But many, if not most, asylum applicants will take weeks to get settled in their new location with a friend or a relative, and many more weeks to obtain pro bono counsel. Almost all organizations that provide pro bono lawyers have long waiting lists and take weeks to provide assistance if they're going to at all. When an asylum applicant is lucky enough to find a lawyer, it will often take the lawyer several months to collect the corroborating evidence.

     

    To understand why months are necessary, we need to look at the kind of corroborating evidence that they collect. To begin with, sworn witness declarations from people in the applicant's home country who know what happened to the applicant are usually desirable. That is, from people who visited the applicant during detention by, detention by persecuting authorities, people who bribed prison officials to let the applicant escape, or in the case of beatings or rapes by government officials or non-government actors, people who tended to the victims after these events. These affidavits are critical evidence, critical corroborating evidence to applicant stories. But these witnesses are themselves often afraid to provide statements, and weeks may be necessary for the applicant and the counsel —of the applicant to persuade them to cooperate. These witnesses often don't speak English, and an interpreter has to be found. Because electronic or written communications may be intercepted by persecuting governments, witnesses have to be instructed how to use encrypted communication methods. Besides witness statements, applicants should have documents to prove their cases. They should have arrest records or jail records or police reports. To show that they were persecuted. They will need identity documents such as birth certificates if they arrived at the border without a passport, which is a lot of— for a lot of people true.

     

    They will need medical records if they received care after being beaten or otherwise tortured. Sometimes they will need medical examinations or x-rays in the United States to prove that their bones or teeth were broken during persecution. Getting low-cost or no-cost medical exams for uninsured foreign nationals can alone takes several weeks. Similarly, psychological examinations can often show post-traumatic, uh, uh, stress disorders or severe depression associated with persecution, and obtaining free psychological examinations requires a lot of time because of the overburdened psychologists who are willing to do this kind of work. For country conditions, that corroborate the story. Published human rights reports often describe a country's general practices, but corroboration of details that corroborate the specific things that happen to an asylum seeker is much more difficult and often requires expert testimony, such as information about conditions in a particular police station in which the applicant was confined, or the treatment of gay and lesbian individuals in the particular village in which the applicant was attacked. Or the prevalence of genital cutting in a remote region of a country that has officially banned the practice. All of this requires expert testimony, and almost none of it can be obtained, even by a represented asylum seeker, in 7 days, or even in the 5 weeks between a positive credible fear determination and the longest time for a merits interview.

     

    If an asylum officer does not grant the claim because of the lack of this corroborating evidence, the applicant is referred to an immigration court for a hearing within, again, an accelerated timeframe. The initial scheduling hearing has to be held within 30 days after the referral and a further hearing 30 days after that. And the corroborating evidence in the immigration court is due at that second hearing, 60 days after the referral takes place. Even that 60-day period is too short, particularly for applicants who are unable to secure counsel until after the asylum office interview has taken place. How much time would be enough? Well, in our clinic here at Georgetown, we're able to collect sufficient corroboration in about 4 months. But those 4 months start after we accept the case. Our clients usually have been bounced around among other pro bono organizations with long waiting lists for weeks or months before they get to us. Furthermore, our caseload is unusually low because our primary mission is education. Students work in pairs and spend full time for a semester in our clinic handling just one case. Lawyers with caseloads of 50 or 75 cases at a time can't spend nearly the amount of time collecting evidence for each case as we do.

     

    So in my personal estimation, for this new system to work, and it can work and it can be fair, Asylum applicants should be given at least 5 or 6 months before the merits interview with the asylum officer. That may seem like a long time compared with 21 days, but it's very short compared with the 4 years that it now takes to get adjudication. The initial statistics that have emerged from the process are unsurprising in view of the very short time for merits interviews. Of the first 329 individuals who have been scheduled for merits interviews, in an asylum office. Only 9 of the 329 had legal representatives. 76 of those cases have had decisions so far. 52 of them were not granted asylum, so the grant rate was 31.5%, not out of line with the grant rate for affirmative cases generally. But of the 52 people who were turned down, only 1 had a representative. 1 person out of 52 people who were turned down in their applications, while a quarter of the 24 people who were granted had representatives. There's no way to know whether a 31.5% grant rate is too high or too low.

     

    I have no opinion on that, but keep in mind that all of these individuals had already been found to have a significant chance of winning asylum, a credible fear of persecution, and many studies have shown that a legal representative makes a huge difference in the chance of prevailing in an asylum case. Now, if the Department of Homeland Security is unwilling to increase significantly the time for an applicant to obtain counsel and for counsel to collect corroboration that's required by the REAL ID Act, there is one other thing that the Homeland Security Department and the Department of Justice could do to avoid stacking the deck against these individuals. Recall, I read to you the PRE— the REAL ID Act. Recall, it does not require corroboration if the applicant does not have the evidence and could not reasonably obtain the evidence. So if the Homeland Security Department is unwilling to extend the time to 5 or 6 months from 21 to 45 days, it should instruct its asylum officers that in cases under the new system Because of the short time period imposed, applicants cannot reasonably obtain corroborating evidence if they did not bring it to the border, and almost nobody brings it to the border.

     

    Therefore, if these instructions were given to asylum officers, the REAL ID Act would no longer stand in the way of asylum for these asylum seekers. They could win relief on the basis of their credible testimony alone. Thank you.

     

     

    [00:29:06.06] - Andrew I. Schoenholtz

    Spontaneous reactions, huh? Was it because he's a professor? Is that what this is about? Thank you very much, Phil. I didn't even have to pass the 2-minute note, did you? Seriously, thank you, Phil, for sharing that with us. So, Jennifer, we would now be grateful if you would share with us your knowledge and perspective regarding this new system and any other border asylum issue that you'd like to help our audience understand.

     

     

    [00:29:37.07] - Jennifer B. Higgins

    Definitely. Thank you so much. And thank you, Andy, for convening this panel and to MPI and CLINIC and the Georgetown Law Center for being able to pull this together. I have to say, I am thrilled to be on the panel with these two very distinguished guests and with you, Mr. Schoenholtz. I I think it's so valuable to bring folks together to talk about these issues. My only regret is I do have to catch a plane after this because I would really love to spend a little more time digging into some of the things that we've just discussed. But I think, Sara, you and I have already agreed to do that. So, so I really appreciate hearing these perspectives, and hopefully I can provide a little bit of a perspective from the government side of the house and the operational side of the house. It's, it's really interesting to actually be here today to talk about this issue because, um, you know, a few, several years ago, actually probably more like a decade and a half ago, I remember being an asylum officer and talking about this concept, this idea that an asylum officer would be able to grant protection in the first instance at the border.

     

    Um, and of course, you know, Many folks have talked about this principle and this concept for many years. Many people in this room, many of the experts in this room have perhaps even recommended going down a similar path. So it's interesting to be able to be here today and talk through some of this. That being said, I fully recognize that the current version of the Interim Final Rule, while it may reflect that core principle of having an asylum officer making a decision in the first instance. It doesn't necessarily fully align in terms of how it's been implemented in practice with some of those other recommendations that folks have had. But, you know, the thinking remains the same. The idea and concept behind the rule is that we can leverage the training and experience of asylum officers and have a non-adversarial setting in the first instance. That hopefully we can leverage efficiencies by ensuring and eliminating the need for all asylum officers to have to go in front of an immigration court. People can get protection earlier and people can get a decision regardless of whether it is favorable or a decision to remove more timely.

     

    So I thought I would spend a little bit of time just kind of talking through the process and how the rule is being implemented in practice. But I really look forward to getting into some of what I imagine are going to be some really great questions. So I'm— hopefully I won't go over time. So I think as most of you know, we have implemented the rule in what we're calling a phased implementation approach. And so what that means is that we are starting small. So CBP and ICE have initially identified a few hundred credible fear referrals per month as potential asylum merit interview cases, or as we call them, AMI cases, because we are the federal government after all and have to have an acronym for everything. Um, the goal, of course, is that we would increase the number of referrals incrementally as our capacity expands. But starting small allows us to talk through some of the issues that you've been hearing from my other panelists and think through how we want to address some of those things. In the final rule or in our operational implementation. So for the initial phase, uh, we have been processing approximately 500 detained single adults per month, uh, have been referred to USCIS for processing under the rule.

     

    Um, since then, we've increased a little bit to 750 referrals per month. And in turn, in determining which cases are actually referred for asylum IFR processing, um, the government is looking at a couple of things. First, and this is really critically important, the destination location of the asylum seeker. The reason this is important is because we wanted to ensure that we were starting out in locations where DOJ has legal orientational programs in place. Of course, they also have to be co-located with a USCIS asylum office and your immigration court. And these locations include Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York, San Francisco, and we recently added Chicago in August. Second, um, we are looking to determine whether the migrant appears to be amenable to release following a positive credible fear determination. In starting small, and as Sara mentioned, the first locations we were starting were with individuals who were single adults and who were detained. Third, we are looking at whether the asylum seeker can be interviewed in English, which is rare, or one of the 47 USCIS contract interpreter languages. In fact, when we started the rule, we were getting a lot of referrals of Turkish applicants, and while that is one of the contract interpreter languages, um, we did not have enough capacity in the interpreter field to be able to, to continue processing those large number of, of Turkish cases.

     

    Um, so we're being flexible with the, the types of cases that are getting referred, provided All those criteria are met after a positive credible fear determination, the asylum seeker's released from detention and placed on an alternative to detention, so ATD, which is essentially a SmartLink telephone app. And I would just note that at the credible fear stage of the process, it's very similar to what it was prior to the implementation of the rule. The standard is the same. I can't remember who mentioned it here, but significant possibility of being able to achieve asylum in, a full asylum claim. So what is different is that upon a positive finding, rather than getting an NTA, uh, and going to an immigration judge, um, as Mr. Schrag said, the individual is scheduled for an interview with an asylum officer. And that's really important because it's a non-adversarial interview. At the same time, they receive detailed documentation about what to expect in terms of that asylum merits interviews. They get a fact sheet which includes the time, the date, the location of the interview, information on how to prepare for the AMI, instructions for rescheduling an AMI and submitting additional evidence, and the consequences for failure to appear for the interview.

     

    The goal of the documents is to help ensure that applicants understand the process and help support their compliance with the next step. And of course, that next step is meeting with an especially trained asylum officer. Importantly, the asylum application— I think it's interesting because we kind of heard two perspectives. One perspective that allowing the written record of the positive credible fear determination to serve as the asylum application is both a positive, but also challenging. You know, Sara raised some, some very good and interesting points about using that written record as the asylum application. But under the purposes of the rule, we are using that written record as the asylum application, and we are able to reuse the biometrics that were captured previously as part of the border process for background check purposes. That means the individual does not need to fill out an asylum application and submit it. And it also means they don't have to go to an application support center for biometric capture. The date that the applicant is served with the written record of the positive credible fear determination is considered the filing date and receipt date for the asylum application. And as you've heard, the asylum merits interview is scheduled to take place no earlier than 21 days after the filing but no later than 45 days after the filing, absent exigent circumstances such as applicant illness.

     

     

    [00:37:59.18] - Jennifer B. Higgins

    All AMI interviews are conducted by asylum officers and a new specialized corps of asylum officers, which ensures that we are— we have our most seasoned staff doing this work. These are higher graded positions at both the asylum officer and the supervisory level. And it— I think that just really reflects what we understand to be the complexity and sensitivity of this new workload. We currently have 175 staff on board, um, and, uh, when we're fully staffed, we expect to have just over 200. I would just share that by comparison, in the FY23 president's budget, USCIS did request $375 million including payroll for 2,000 positions. To support expansion of the rule. So that gives you a sense of the small scale that we're really starting with in this first phase. Um, the other thing I will just point out in light of some of the comments from my, my colleagues on the panel is I think it's really important, the, the, um, points that are being made about access to counsel and representation. But I also think it's really important to reiterate the non-adversarial nature of the work that the asylum officers do and also the extensive training they get.

     

    So these asylum officers not only are very seasoned and have been doing this work for some time and have all the foundational, um, specialized training to be an asylum officer, but this new cadre has an additional 2 weeks of training. And at the very core of that training is a deep understanding that the officer's job is to elicit information. That is their job, to be able to provide every opportunity for the individual that they are meeting with to state their case, to ask those follow-up questions and clarifications if something is sounding strange or is inconsistent with something that is said in the past, making sure they are taking into consideration those cultural issues that, that Sara touched on. That's not to say that the process is perfect. These officers are human beings after all. Um, but I do think it is really important to share that these officers at their very core know that their job is to gather as much information as possible so that they can get to the right decision. Um, like affirmative asylum cases, the asylum officer's decision in the AMI interview is generally served on the applicant in person 2 weeks after the interview takes place.

     

    And all of these decisions undergo supervisory review before they're finalized. We also, just like we do with our regular asylum cases, do periodic quality assurance review checks as well. So as outlined in the rule, AMI adjudications are expected to be completed within that 60-day timeframe— timeframe of the filing date. And as a reminder, that's the date of the positive credible fear determination. Applicants who are found eligible are issued a final grant of asylum. They're authorized to work incident to status. They're eligible for certain benefits, and of course, they can apply for a green card 1 year after the asylum approval and are eligible to be able to file for their immediate family members. If an applicant is found ineligible for asylum, the asylum officer also assesses whether that individual has demonstrated eligibility for statutory Withholding of Removal, or withholding or deferral of removal under CAT, Convention Against Torture. And while asylum officers can't grant that withholding or deferral of removal under CAT, their assessment is considered by the immigration judge when it is referred. If USCIS doesn't grant the case, then that full package is sent to the immigration court for streamlined 240 removal proceedings, with the master calendar hearing being scheduled within 30 to 35 days from the service of the notice to appear.

     

    And under the rule, unlike traditional affirmative asylum interviews, all asylum merit interviews are recorded. So the referrals to the immigration court include a complete transcript as part of the record of proceeding that's served on the court, the applicant, and the applicant's attorney. The transcript is one of the key parts of the process that actually facilitates the expeditious adjudication of the case by EOIR under the new streamlined proceedings. So that's sort of the end-to-end process. Now the numbers. You've heard a few of them, but I'll highlight and reiterate a few here. Hopefully you all have seen that our Office of Immigration Statistics recently published data on the rule's implementation. So you all can access it firsthand and take a look. It's covering the first 75 days of the rule being into— in effect, so from June 1st through August 15th, and we'll be refreshing that data periodically. And if you dig into the statistics on the website, you will find that we've been able to successfully process cases within the time frames that are outlined in the rule. A few key stats: so the median processing time for AMI cases has been 40 days from filing.

     

    Well within that 60-day requirement in the IFR. 24 applicants have been granted asylum and 52 cases are now in streamlined removal proceedings. The immigration courts are just a few weeks into the first of these cases, so we have to wait a bit until we can have sort of meaningful data on the, on the IJ side of the house. I think what these preliminary results reflect is that the rule process does seem to be achieving the primary goal, which is to create an efficient process, albeit on a small scale. I actually had the opportunity to observe an asylum merits interview recently, and I really think another key aspect of the rule that's very positive is that it really is leveraging the expertise and experience of these asylum officers., to be able to adjudicate these cases in the first instance. I was so impressed with the rigor and thought that the officer put into the entire interview and every aspect of it. Um, they're very lengthy, uh, but again, that goes back to that officer's duty to elicit information. That said, we absolutely recognize, as my panelists have shared, that this is taking a process and streamlining it, a process that used to take multiple years and streamlining it down into months.

     

    That's why these panels are so important. That's why it's so important that we're able to connect and coordinate with NGOs, practitioners, getting information on what's working, what's not, what are the unintended consequences, and taking those things into consideration. We already did it at the, at the comment stage of the rule, right? There and there was a part of the rule that actually had asylum officers issuing removal orders based on comments and feedback. We modified that to move to a 2-4— 240 streamlined process. Um, we really look forward to hearing more about some of the concerns, some of the ideas that you all have for improving on this rule, because I will say that I think at its very heart There's a lot of good in this rule, in the concepts and the principles, and I see glimmers of success in how this rule is being implemented and look very much forward to answering your questions and, and also hearing more, hearing more from my panelists.

     

     

    [00:46:06.24] - Andrew I. Schoenholtz

    Thank you very much, Jennifer. Appreciate you walking through the process carefully so everybody has a sense of how it actually works, and perhaps that helps you integrate the other panelists' remarks as well. So we're going to open it up for questions. Please, if you're here physically, come to the microphone. When you do have a question, I would like you to identify yourself so our panelists know who you are. If you're with an organization, let us know that as well. And we also have questions from the, from our virtual audience. In addition. So let me allow our first questioner here physically, and I'm going to go back and forth with our virtual audience because I want them engaged as well.

     

     

    [[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

     

    [00:46:55.22] - Speaker 1

    Go right ahead. Is it working?

     

     

    [00:47:06.00] - Speaker 1

    One of them will, we promise.

     

     

    [00:47:08.22] - Speaker 5

    Here we go.

     

     

    [00:47:11.21] - Speaker 1

    Thank you so much.

     

     

    [00:47:12.14] - Speaker 5

    Thanks. I'm Peggy Sanz-Orzechowski. I'm a congressional correspondent for the Hispanic Outlook magazine. I've covered Congress for over 15 years, and I've written 2 books on immigration with a focus on how our immigration laws have evolved over history. And I just did a long interview in Spanish with a young girl, a 26-year-old, who had walked from Ecuador to Texas in 45 days, walked across the river, and was welcomed, got a bus to DC, and she's been here several weeks. She— the easiest part to come to, easiest country to come through, the river and Texas. A Border Patrol officer helped her out. Asked her how she was, took her to a registration center. She was asked 2 questions: "What is your name? What is your nationality?" She told me she's Venezuelan. I have to take her word for it. I asked her if she had papers. She was told not to bring any while she crossed over. And she said immediately, a man— I think it's USCIS, I'm not sure— from the ISAP, Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. I've never heard of that. She said several times, automaticamente, automaticamente. He gave everybody a claim, an application for asylum.

     

     

    [00:48:48.15] - Speaker 5

    So once they got this automatic claim, they went to a tent city, got clothes, phones. 3 days later, she's taken to a little town in Texas where she was immediately— they were told, you're free to go. Where you want. And she said, with her application, some people were there, said, we're putting a bus together to go to Washington, D.C. And she said, great. And that's how she came here. There are tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands who have not been vetted in any way. So I'm thrilled you have this new program. It sounds really good. But what are you going to do about the hundreds of thousands of people who have not been vetted, not asked one question about COVID or anything, of course? I don't know what the ISAP is. And I'm wondering about the Venezuelan. She was a Venezuelan but lived in Ecuador for 5 years, so was not fleeing immediate prosecution or any kind. OK. Let's leave our questions to people to answer. So 2 questions, ISAP and Venezuelans. Does it matter how long they've lived elsewhere? Are they still given— temporary protected status just on the basis of their nationality?

     

     

    [00:50:03.17] - Speaker 5

    So those are my two questions.

     

     

    [00:50:05.09] - Speaker 1

    Thank you, Peggy. Who would like to begin?

     

     

    [00:50:08.09] - Speaker 4

    So, so maybe I can start. Um, so it's, it's very difficult to assess the specifics of this young woman, uh, without, you know, talking more to her or, or checking our systems and that kind of thing. But I, I would just push on one of the underlying pieces and premises of what you were, what you were relaying, which is that these individuals who are processed at the border are done so without any screening or vetting at all. That's just simply not the case. DHS takes fingerprints, they run biometric checks, they run biographic checks, they do ask a series of questions. And so to say that they're not vetted is just not accurate. So I just wanted to set the record straight there. Certainly— Yeah, yeah. And the other thing I would just share is you point out exactly actually what Sara started the panel with, which is there are a variety of different pathways at this point with individuals who arrive at the border. Some people are expelled under Title 42. Some people claim asylum and they are processed under this phased implementation of this interim final rule. Others are processed under expedited removal. So there are different pathways.

     

     

    [00:51:30.08] - Speaker 4

    And so it sounds to me like this young woman was processed under one of those pathways.

     

     

    [00:51:37.03] - Speaker 2

    Well, and Jennifer, I can just jump in there because I think some of what that story illustrates is the confusion that immigrants experience going through the process. If you had called my office and asked me that question, I would say, "Stop. I need to talk to the person and only when she brings me her paperwork." Because I can almost guarantee you she probably has not been given an asylum form to fill out. ISAP is a monitoring company. It's not part of the government. So they're not attorneys. They're not required to advise them how to pursue asylum laws in our country. I suspect that there are things that she is confused about based on what you're telling me. And I can say that that would not— I'm saying that because of like years of experience. I've been doing this on the border since 2012. Almost— I've talked to people in detention, outside detention. I mean, thousands of people. And it's very rare that someone's not confused about something. So It just goes back to what, you know, Philip and I were talking about. Talking to an attorney or, you know, an accredited rep, someone who has experience in asylum law, is crucial in individual cases.

     

     

    [00:52:50.23] - Speaker 2

    The other thing I wanted to just briefly mention as a bit of an aside, TPS, Temporary Protective Status, is granted for 18-month periods of time. It's not permanent status in the country, so it's really, you could say it's a stopgap for certain circumstances. But it's really not a replacement of our asylum system. My understanding is that the designation date for Venezuela is passed, and she probably came subsequent to that, so she wouldn't be eligible. One of the big issues with TPS is— and, you know, we saw this with Haiti, we see it with Venezuela, we see it with every country— you come one day after that designation date, you're in the exact same situation as a person who came a day before, and you don't have access to that form of temporary protection. And we've been working on a letter to Congress on that, specific issue, but I'll just leave it there so we can take some more questions.

     

     

    [00:53:39.11] - Speaker 1

    Thank you so much. And there later this afternoon, there will be a panel that among other subjects, they'll be talking about TPS. So let me take a question from our virtual audience before we turn to Reverend Ippolito. How does the asylum backlog play into the deadlines that Professor Schrag is mentioning? So this is another, it's a clarifying question, right? People are confused by all this information. How can you help them understand that? Phil?

     

     

    [00:54:09.13] - Speaker 3

    These are the—uh, I don't know what the question means by deadlines. Is he talking about the asylum application deadline, or the—

     

     

    [00:54:19.04] - Speaker 1

    I think the deadlines in the interim final rule that you were describing and that Jennifer has described? That's my best guess.

     

     

    [00:54:28.19] - Speaker 4

    Did you want me to take this?

     

     

    [00:54:29.19] - Speaker 3

    Yeah, go ahead, take it.

     

     

    [00:54:30.22] - Speaker 4

    Yeah, sure. So yeah, so certainly there is a large asylum backlog for individuals who, you know, were already in the United States applying for asylum. Um, so those cases are outside of the border context in this interim final rule that we're discussing here. The one thing that I will say, and that and they are sort of interrelated, is that we have a finite amount of asylum officer staff. It's just the reality. And we are very grateful that we've received some appropriated positions. Uh, we are hopeful that we will, uh, be able to get, um, the request that is currently in the FY23 president's budget. Um, but the bottom line is there are going to be— it comes down to prioritization. You know, we have some appropriated positions to be able to focus solely on the backlog, but that's small in number and the backlog is large. It's about comparable to what it was many years ago when it took us a decade to get through that backlog. So in that sense, if we are prioritizing individuals arriving at our border, then tho— those resources are, are not being used to tackle our backlog. But they are two separate asylum streams, and that goes back to the whole process being rather confusing given that there are so many different pathways.

     

     

    [00:55:55.23] - Speaker 1

    Thanks for clarifying that, Jennifer.

     

     

    [00:55:57.04] - Speaker 1

    And this is an old problem for those who are new to this system, that the resources that the executive branch decides to use in one way or another affects another part of the system and the laws that Congress has created. But that's Congress's responsibility to fund, right?

     

     

    [00:56:14.04] - Speaker 3

    And I just add that this affects the immigration court system as well. Exactly. So to the extent that this new asylum merits interview process is denying or not granting asylum to people, they're going to immigration court. They have priority in the immigration court. What's that going to do to all the people who already have cases pending in the immigration court? It's going to push them further back back in the backlog, right? So instead of waiting 4 years, they may have to wait 5 years to have their cases heard.

     

     

    [00:56:46.09] - Speaker 2

    So to, like, on the flip side of that, look at what the Interim Final Rule actually says, or, um, the idea is that 15% of those cases that would initially have gotten to the courts never will get to the courts because they'll be granted at the AMI stage. And so we just have to see how these numbers shake out, and it's going to take probably longer than 6 months I would suspect it's going to take probably closer to 9 months to a year before we're going to actually have a good number of stats on how the court system itself is affected by this process.

     

     

    [00:57:16.07] - Speaker 4

    You took the words right out of my mouth, and I was literally going to say, and on the flip side, um, we are, we are keeping some cases from clogging up the immigration courts.

     

     

    [00:57:26.24] - Speaker 1

    And just one technical question about the transcript you raised, Jennifer. How has that worked so far? Has the transcript of the AMI actually been created in a timely way that it has been transmitted to the immigration courts?

     

     

    [00:57:40.17] - Speaker 4

    Great question. So, um, this is actually one of the, the big successes, was being able to so quickly leverage a contract to be able to get those transcription services. And we are starting small, so most of those transcripts have been able to be provided within 30 days, which is the timeline. But it is resource intensive, and we are monitoring that very closely to make sure that they don't get prolonged, because we do think that as now that we've grown a little bit, we could start to see those timelines start to slip. So it's a great point. Thank you.

     

     

    [00:58:16.11] - Speaker 1

    Reverend Ippolito.

     

     

    [00:58:17.06] - Speaker 6

    Father Ippolito, Catholic Charities Immigration Services in Houston. I'm a DOJ accredited rep. Um, thank you for bringing up the topic, Mrs. Higgins, of backlog, because that's what my question is. USCIS has demonstrated they can fix backlogs. DACA renewals are now going anywhere from 9 to 28 days. We made some great progress in U visa work cards, 4 years. Congratulations. However, you know, the rest of it is deep, deep in backlogs. I-90 renewals, that should be a piece of cake. And I got one the other day in 3 weeks. But most of them are 9, 10, 11 months. These should be a A no-brainer if somebody hasn't committed any crimes, you know, 485s, my God, citizenship. What can we do? What are we doing about backlogs?

     

     

    [00:59:07.15] - Speaker 4

    It's a great question. Our director, if she were here, would of course share that getting through our backlogs is an absolute top priority for the agency. And we're really focused on people, process, Technology, right? Those are the 3 things that are going to help us get through the backlog. First, people. We already sort of touched on that where, you know, we, because of a near furlough, a hiring freeze, it's been challenging to be able to have a fully functional workforce with all of our positions filled. So, we have been working very hard Anyone's interested, we're hiring, on filling those vacancies with fantastic people. So that is a big focus, obviously, is filling our vacancies. And in fact, we have a goal to try to do so and get to a 95% fill rate by the end of the calendar year. It can't just be people though. You got to look at process, right? I've been working in the government since 1999. And we're really good at adding new things to the process. We're really bad at taking a bigger picture look to see what we can take away now that we've added something new. But our director is leading the charge in, in challenging the agency to do just that.

     

     

    [01:00:33.24] - Speaker 4

    And so, you know, have, have already been putting in some, some, some new policies in place to be able to address some of these, these process issues and create some efficiencies. Get rid of redundancies. And then the last thing is technology. And to me, this is probably one of the most exciting things that we're really working on. I mean, we were already— uh, sir, you mentioned I-90s, and, uh, you know, we're looking at how can we use technology and automation so that we can process cases in a timely way, especially those aspects of a case that don't require human discretion. Or really cutting down on handoffs, right? If you're digitizing files, if you're filing electronically, and of course not everybody can do that, but if you are, you cut down on the, on snail mail and handoffs of cases to other offices that take time. So all that to say, I'm really excited about our director's vision in this regard, and we're already making some really good progress and laying that foundation this year. And I think you're going to start to see see that bear fruit as we enter FY23.

     

     

    [01:01:41.07] - Speaker 1

    Thank you, Jennifer. Before we come back to our in-person audience, a question from our virtual audience: What can we do to deal with asylum seekers? I am not a lawyer. How can I help? What advocacy can be done? So would anybody like to take that question? Sara?

     

     

    [01:02:02.24] - Speaker 2

    What I will say is I know I sped through my last few slides. I understand that the conference organizers can make those available to folks who want a copy of those. And I will include a link in there to our Interim Final Rule processing page, which connects to the official Interim Final Rule in the Federal Register, as well as to our public comment that talks about, you know, where we see potential issues with the Interim Final Rule. As well as to the M444 form, which I think, Jennifer, you were alluding to, which is the advisory provided to individuals. My understanding is currently it's being provided in English and Spanish and not other languages, but there's some resources there by other organizations as well that will hopefully help orient folks who want some more information. And then, you know, specifically in terms of how to get involved, that depends a lot on your personal circumstances. I can tell you with regards to doing requests for reconsiderations, we do not have Spanish translators who are regularly available to the degree that we need, and we've had people missing the 7-day deadline because of lack of translation. We've looked— we're running between like a week to 2 weeks to get things translated sometimes at our office.

     

     

    [01:03:18.01] - Speaker 2

    And if anyone has further questions for me, I'm staying for lunch. But also you can reach out to us at [email protected] if you want to be added to our newsletter when we do a final report, hopefully at the end of this year, with some of these charts when we have a few more data points and can draw some more conclusive conclusions. We're happy to add you to our newsletter list or otherwise communicate. So I hope that provides a little bit of information. I mean, I think there are like community groups that provide welcoming at Union station or otherwise can assist them with different services. So depending on where you live, your language skills, if opportunities need to be virtual or in person, that's really kind of, I think, a personal question in many ways.

     

     

    [01:04:05.20] - Speaker 1

    Thanks so much, Sara. Maggie, please.

     

     

    [01:04:09.01] - Speaker 7

    Thank you. My name is Maggie Riley. I'm a policy analyst with Boundless Immigration in Seattle. And just thank you all, all of the panelists who've been here today for being present. And I just had a question. I am curious about the level of interagency communication and cooperation, especially in light of the interim final rule on asylum, which you've been discussing today, but also last week's DOJ rule that would allow attorneys to submit for limited representation in immigration courts. And I was sort of curious if there was an intersection there, given that we have expedited timelines now under the interim final rule. What was the level of agency coordination, or were these sort of independently tracked ideas? It seems like they might dovetail together, so I was just curious if that was something anybody could speak to.

     

     

    [01:04:55.22] - Speaker 1

    Thank you, Maggie. An easy question for you, Jennifer. Interagency cooperation.

     

     

    [01:05:00.08] - Speaker 4

    So actually, I, I, it's, it's embarrassing a bit because I was remiss in, in touting that as, I think, one of the successes of the interim final rule. Actually, I actually think that the coordination among the agencies not just in terms of creating the rule itself, but also how we're implementing it, is working really well. The fact that we are working so closely with ICE, CBP, OPLA, but also, as I said before, the NGO and practitioner communities, it's, I think, a nice model for that kind of collaboration and interaction. I can't actually speak to the DOJ rule myself, But I can tell you that our policy entities who usually manage the, you know, the rule process and work very, very closely with their DOJ colleagues, in fact, have regular working group sessions and discussions with them on how to modify rules, what rules are going to be part of the primary agenda for the year, and which ones will be prioritized. But I think you raise a really interesting point. Something that I can, I can take back.

     

     

    [01:06:07.01] - Speaker 2

    Yeah, let me jump in there real quickly. On the EOIR rule, that's in response to the litigation of Mendez Rojas. DOJ issued a cease and desist order to the Northwest Immigrants' Rights Project to not provide any form of assistance, basically, to pro se individuals, and that was very quickly litigated, for good reason. So this is the result of intensive settlement negotiations between the parties represented by NWIRP. And I have not read it personally. I think there's some good parts to it and there's some parts that I'm not as happy about, but I think overall it's probably a pretty good movement forward. I'm gonna have to push back a little bit on what you just said, Jennifer, with the stakeholder engagement. There's a group of us who meet at an kind of a national level on trying to track what's happening with implementation of the Interim Final Rule, and there's been a lack of knowledge about certain pieces of the rollout that's been frustrating. There's been multiple emails to USCIS requesting, for example, copies of certain documents that have taken weeks, and in fact, I think in certain situations we haven't even got— we haven't gotten response on some of our questions.

     

     

    [01:07:20.04] - Speaker 2

    We are very much looking forward to today at 4:00 PM when USCIS has invited a group of us to stakeholders call to hopefully iron out some of these issues. I have been asking USCIS Houston Asylum Office for a couple of weeks if they can take RFR requests in Spanish, and I have not gotten a response on that. So it's just, it's little things like that that can make a big difference in practice that hopefully we can iron out. I mean, another huge issue is the only way that I know of for people to submit these pro se is to snail mail, right? And so if there's a 7-day deadline and they're snail mailing across half the state of Texas, which, you know, it's like, it's gonna take 4 days to get there, business days, right? So, you know, why can't they scan and email? Why can't they provide access with a Dropbox where that can be sent by some officer? There's creative solutions to some of these issues that I think hopefully we'll be able to work out moving forward in engagement with the agency. But it has been a little bit slower than I think many of us were hoping for.

     

     

    [01:08:20.16] - Speaker 3

    One of the most important relationships between USCIS and the NGO community, I think, is in assistance to these migrants to obtain counsel. So it's wonderful that USCIS is providing people in the new AMI process with clear information about where to go for their hearings and when to go for their for their interviews and where and when to go for their interviews. But it would be the simplest thing in the world for them also to provide the official pro bono list of service providers, legal services providers, in the cities to which these people are going. They know— the USCIS knows where they're going. That's the whole point of this rollout, is they're selecting the cities to which the people are going. And in each of those cities There is an immigration court official list of pro bono legal services providers. That list, as far as I can tell, is not being given along with the instructions on where and when to show up for the interviews. Is that correct?

     

     

    [01:09:28.22] - Speaker 4

    So there is information for obtaining those services that's provided. I think one of the questions was whether we could get some additional information translated. There's also— I know that our other component colleagues have been able to set up phone hotlines and other things to be able to direct people into the right location. Having said that, there's still more that we can do, and so I think some of these ideas are things that we're going to be taking stock of, and certainly, Sara, I take your point. I think it's a matter of perspective, and it's not to say that by saying I think that we've done a decent job of coordination means that there couldn't be more. Or more interaction, and we're really looking forward to that stakeholder engagement this afternoon.

     

     

    [01:10:17.04] - Speaker 1

    So we're almost out of time, so Imani, if you would ask your question. I apologize, but we're— I hope you can ask your question to our panelists afterwards. I appreciate that. But Imani, please go right ahead.

     

     

    [01:10:29.06] - Speaker 8

    Hi, Imani Cruz, a Migration Policy Advocacy Coordinator with American Friends Service Committee, and we've talked a lot about how these asylum processing rules now really affect immigration courts and how there's plans to expand it as well.

     

     

    [01:10:43.10] - Speaker 8

    I'm kind of curious if there are thoughts on how this program will kind of affect the adjudication of immigration cases after Title 42 has ended.

     

     

    [01:10:53.20] - Speaker 8

    I know there's not really— doesn't seem to be plans to do that anytime soon, but eventually it will be ended. So I just would love to hear any thoughts on that.

     

     

    [01:11:01.11] - Speaker 4

    Sure, I'm happy to take that. So Title 42, of course, is a public health authority, and, uh, what if— when Title 42, uh, eventually goes away, we will see those individuals having to access different pathways, right? Title 42 is the public health authority, and we defer to CDC on that, um, but Title 8 is the authority for processing through expedited removal or other immigration pathways. So the individuals who are currently being expelled under Title 42 would move into a Title 8 immigration pathway. So that's sort of how they're, they're interrelated.

     

     

    [01:11:43.15] - Speaker 1

    Thank you very much, Jennifer. So before I give you all instructions about lunch and when we'll come back together, I first want to thank our panelists for an excellent discussion and presentation of information. There's a lot to take in. I hope you have a chance to meet with some of them afterwards. Jennifer has to run. We're really grateful that she changed her schedule to be here. But first, I'd like to thank our panelists for an excellent discussion.

12:30 –  1:30 p.m. ET  -  Lunch

1:30 p.m. ET

The Court Is Now in Session: The Growing Role of Litigation to Shape Legal and Policy Developments
In a trend that began several administrations ago and has dramatically accelerated, opponents of the administration in power have been heading to court to block immigration policies and rulemaking. During the Biden administration, red state elected officials have turned to the courts to block changes to interior enforcement, the end of the Migrant Protection Protocols, the use of prosecutorial discretion, and more.

​How were court rulings affecting the Biden agenda, and how is the administration responding? What do recent Supreme Court decisions, including on DACA, suggest for the future? And what have been the impacts and politics of states banding together in litigation against administrations of the opposing party? Beyond turning to the courts, Texas has asserted a muscular role in immigration enforcement, spending billions of dollars on a border operation, busing migrants to Washington, DC and New York, and more. In the continued absence of action by Congress, would more states rush in to fill the power vacuum?

• Moderator: Muzaffar Chishti, MPI Senior Fellow and Director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law
• Speakers:
  • Kristie De Peña, Vice President of Policy and Director of Immigration, Niskanen Center
  • Suzanne Gamboa, Senior National Reporter, NBC Latino

  • Cristina Rodríguez, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law, Yale Law School

    Show full transcript

    This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

     

    [00:00:05.02] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Good afternoon and welcome to those of us who have joined us online. This is a panel which is called The Court is in Session: The Growing Role of Litigation to Shape Legal and Policy Developments. And the court is the Supreme Court, but Supreme Court is not in session, but we are. And to preside over that panel, I have really three really distinguished panelists who look at this issue of intersection of litigation and politics from various perspectives. And their bios are in the handout that you have. And I really— they're so distinguished and long, it'll take me a long time to to recite them. I will not do that, but briefly, on my immediate right is Kristie De Peña. She is Vice President of Policy and Director of Immigration at the Niskanen Center. Immediately on her right is Suzanne Gamboa, a veteran reporter on immigration policy issues and now a senior national reporter on NBC Latino. Stationed in Texas. And joining me online is my dear old friend and colleague Cristina Rodriguez, who is a chaired professor at Yale Law School, has also before that—

     

    Hi, Cristina. Who has served at the Office of Legal Counsel in the DOJ in the Obama administration and is an occasional consultant to the Department of Justice. But most importantly, she's one of our most newest board members of MPI. So welcome to all three of you. So as I said, the court is not in session, but we are. And we are today looking at how immigration is playing out in the federal courts and playing out in the Supreme Court especially, and what the ramifications of what court does has in the world of politics. And let me just start with Cristina, if you don't mind, just because you have been a clerk at the Supreme Court, you have watched the Supreme Court over time. And I think I will say this without fear of contradiction, that Supreme Court has never been more busy on immigration as it has been in the last few years. Everything from the trend of Trump administration to the Biden administration, from travel bans to census to public charge to MPP to the recent decision on prosecutorial discretion, it has covered a swath of issues. And so after Roberts Court, now probably we'll have seen most challenges to the executive authority on immigration than probably any court in history.

     

    And so at the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration, how would you tell us where have we landed on Supreme Court's view on the discretion of the president in immigration writ large?

     

     

     

    [00:03:35.24] - Cristina Rodriguez

    Thank you, Muz, and thanks to everyone at MPI and at Georgetown for having me here. I'm sorry I can't be there in person, but I'm excited to have this conversation over Zoom and with you. Muz, you're not wrong to think that this is an era of unprecedented litigation at the Supreme Court over immigration matters. It has long been the case that the INA generates a steady diet of cases of statutory interpretation and sometimes constitutional questions before the court. But I think that the rise in the executive branch's use of its policymaking tools to shape immigration policy and the subsequent litigation has meant that the court has had a number of cases that implicate those policymaking tools on its docket in ways we haven't seen before. Some of that, or much of that, has to do with how we've seen dramatic swings in immigration policy over the last 3 administrations. And I would date what you're describing back to the Obama years. That has been combined with a slog in the courts and arguably an acceleration of judicial intervention to constrain and block executive policymaking. And there could be a number of different factors that have contributed to that.

     

     

     

    [00:04:50.09] - Cristina Rodriguez

    But I think there's no question that we're seeing the judicialization of executive branch policy. In recent years and just this past term, I think the Supreme Court itself has mainly reinforced considerable executive control over immigration policy, though the lower courts have made that a protracted process that has prevented administrations from implementing some of their signature initiatives. And there are also potential developments on the horizon, some of which are the product of recent precedents by the Supreme Court that could have a seriously constraining effect, especially with respect to policies central to this administration. And I thought it might be helpful, Muz, and you could tell me if you want to talk about a different feature of this, to start by talking about the MPP wind down just a little bit, because I think that it embodies this tension between jurisprudence that remains open to executive branch policymaking, but trends in the courts that actually might constrain important dimensions of the executive's policymaking abilities. So I think in this audience, MPP probably doesn't require much definition, but maybe I'll say a little bit about what it is and then what's happened and what that might suggest about where we're headed.

     

    And some of these principles or some of these predictions would apply to any number of the executive branch policies that are currently either headed for litigation or stuck in litigation. So MPP was a program begun by the Trump administration. MPP is an acronym for Migrant Protection Protocols. It's also known as the Remain in Mexico policy and was part of a larger effort to crack down on illegal border crossers and limit the reach of the asylum laws. It relies on two sections of the INA, including a provision that's been used on an ad hoc basis before, but was used systematically by the Trump administration to return non-Mexican nationals arriving by land to Mexico to await their removal proceedings. So the policy was adopted against an important backdrop to all executive branch policymaking, and that is that the government has never been able to detain all people who are authorized to be detained, maybe even mandatorily so, under the statutes. And previously, the government would release people on parole or some other grounds, but MPP was the answer of the Trump administration to large numbers of people at the border. Well, following the change in administration on January 20th, 2021, there was an attempt to rescind MPP.

     

    And I won't go through all of the details of the back and forth, even though they do matter to the litigation. And not long after it was announced that it would be rescinded, one of these dynamics that I know that we'll talk about today entered the picture with Texas and Missouri seeking to enjoin the— at first, the failure to enroll people in MPP, but then subsequently, a challenge to the actual decision by the administration to rescind MPP. So long story short, the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court did 3 things that matter to the future of executive control over immigration policy. The first was that it applied a ruling from earlier in the term that found that the INA limits district courts' abilities to issue injunctions on a class-wide basis to address a number of different provisions, to implement a number of different provisions of the immigration code. And so this question about whether this tool of the injunction, which has been used by courts to stymie administrative policy efforts by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is, is now an open question. But secondly, the court found discretion in the INA and rejected the arguments of the states and of the Fifth Circuit and of the district court that MPP was the only alternative to mandatory detention for people who arrived at the border and weren't clearly entitled to be admitted.

     

    The way in which the court did this was extremely important, I think, because it relied in part on longstanding practice of the executive branch, that since 1996, no administration has treated this so-called contiguous territory provision as mandatory, that the executive retained discretion to use it or not. And whether it was otherwise comporting with its detention obligations did not make the provision mandatory. The court, in doing this, also recognized the government's parole authority as something that at least existed to be used on a case-by-case basis. It didn't address whether the Biden administration has been using parole in a lawful fashion, but it did acknowledge its existence as a tool. And then finally, and this is where there might be some ominous clouds and potential for further mischief with executive efforts to shape immigration policy, the court returned the case to the district court to have the court consider whether the administration's rescission of MPP was consistent with the Administrative Procedure Act. Whether it was arbitrary and capricious. Now, in the case, the Fifth Circuit has also already given us a very clear answer. Uh, it thinks that it was in fact arbitrary and capricious. This is separate from whether it was mandated by statute.

     

    It's whether the administration gave good enough reasons for its goals. And the Fifth Circuit's analysis was not just your typical review for rationality. It was a very intrusive policy discussion that, that attempted to hold the administration's feet to the fire. This is where we're going next. This same idea that courts can really scrutinize the reasons that an administration gives for adopting a policy has also affected the enjoining of the Mayorkas enforcement priority memos, where the court is not just accepting that the executive has discretion to make choices about how to enforce the law, it's actually looking at the studies that it cites and finding reasons that it failed to consider alternatives. And the last thing I'll say here is that the court in the Civil Enforcement Priorities case, another Texas district court— we could talk about this case in some more detail— traced its analysis to the Supreme Court's decision in the Regents decision, which is the case in which Supreme Court found the Trump administration had not lawfully rescinded DACA, which some people consider a big win. But in that opinion, our the legal tools to prevent a subsequent administration from changing immigration policy to meet its priorities.

     

    And that's where we are now, Muz, is state litigants with administrative law tools able to stand in the way of administrations seamlessly implementing their immigration policies that we once thought were well within their discretionary authority.

     

     

     

    [00:11:57.06] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So in layperson's language, could we say Supreme Court is basically saying The president has a lot of authority in immigration, but must do it right.

     

     

     

    [00:12:06.03] - Cristina Rodriguez

    That's, that's one way of saying it. Yes. But doing it right is where the battle is.

     

     

     

    [00:12:13.18] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So let me just stick with you for a second. Also, you mentioned right in the beginning of the analysis that this decision and I think other recent decisions for the first time in a long time started showing Supreme Court's lack of appetite for single federal court judges issuing nationwide injunctions, because that has been the practice for a long time. So where are we today on the ability of single court justices issuing nationwide injunctions?

     

     

     

    [00:12:44.23] - Cristina Rodriguez

    This is a long-simmering issue, and it's not limited to immigration law. I think that there are two important considerations. One is specific to immigration law, and in the Aleman Gonzalez v. Garland case from last term that the court then cites in the MPP case. The court interprets a provision of the INA that says, um, that no court except for the Supreme Court shall have jurisdiction to enjoin or restrain the operation of certain provisions of the INA to preclude, in that particular case which involved class-wide, uh, bond hearings, uh, from issuing injunctions other than in cases that involve single individuals. In a case like Aleman Gonzalez, what that means then is that individuals then have to bring cases on their own without the benefit of aggregation. But it also could potentially mean that injunctions have been issued against a lot of administration policies are no longer valid under this provision. That remains to be litigated. And whether something falls within the terms of the statute is a case-by-case kind of determination. The decision And Aleman Gonzalez also does not address whether lower courts can vacate opinions for violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, this arbitrary and capricious or otherwise contrary to law set of principles.

     

    And that's— that is another way in which district courts can make a considerable amount of mischief by vacating those policies. So that is another dimension of this that needs to be litigated. But I do think you're right that some of the judges, including dissenters in the Aleman Gonzalez case, because it was a statutory case, are growing impatient with the ability of a single district court to stop the implementation of a national policy. Just last week, Justice Kagan gave a speech where she criticized the district court nationwide injunction as well as the forum shopping that is a partner to those injunctions where litigants go to a court that they think is likely to rule in their favor. Leads to not only the stymieing of federal policy, but it further politicizes the courts in a way that at least she and others find a worrisome trend.

     

     

     

    [00:15:11.18] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Right. Yeah, I couldn't get a better summary of this. Let me just shift to Kristie. So we know that the Supreme Court did not allow Trump administration to end DACA, but it was then brought back on the merits, and Judge Hanen in district court in Texas said DACA was unlawful, and he let the current recipients continue to receive, but no one else. And that's now in appeal in Fifth Circuit. So obviously one of these dangling issues in litigation is DACA. And probably one of the most prominent. I know you've been paying a lot of attention to DACA. First, tell me from your point of view, how do you expect things to come out in the Fifth Circuit? And we can all list what the outcomes could be and determine on those outcomes, or what do you think the next step is going to be?

     

     

     

    [00:16:10.03] - Kristie De Peña

    Yeah, so, you know, I think that a lot of folks in this room whose faces I recognize, and it's great to see in person, have been paying, you know, a lot of close attention to what's going on in DACA. And I think that it kind of hearkens back to some of these decisions that Cristina is talking about. You know, so the rescission of DACA told us a lot about the way that we can anticipate Justices Thomas and Alito, and Alito and Gorsuch to rule on an eventual case that may make its way up to the Supreme Court, as everyone's sort of guessing. That it will. I think looking back at some of the, even the DAPA litigation in 2015, you know, we saw a conversation among Supreme Court justices about the merits of a program that is very similar to DACA, and so I think that we're going to see a very similar message and debate about the merits, but I think that there is an important distinction about what happened in DAPA that didn't happen in, or that is happening in the DACA case. And that there has been some kind of judicial recognition about the contributions that DACA recipients have had over the past decade and certainly the reliance that they have placed on a program that has been in place for 10 years.

     

    While I don't think, to your question, Muz, that that's going to really influence the way that the court finds on the outcome of the case, I don't think that it looks good for DACA recipients. I think that it's a pretty bleak outcome that we can anticipate from both the Fifth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court. What I do think that that lends itself to is really making the case to lawmakers that this is, number one, an incredibly urgent issue, and number two, that there is all of this really widespread recognition, not only on the part of, you know, all the players that submitted amicus briefs in some of these cases, but even amongst some of the judges and, you know, the DHS in talking about these cases, about really the impact that Dreamers have had on the U.S. and I think that that is going to be influential in their response to whatever it is that the courts find in the next weeks and months. And so, there's been a lot of great data that's come out, of course, from a lot of the organizations that I see here on the economic, the financial, the societal, the familiar repercussions of, you know, what can really happen to the roughly 610,000 to 700,000 folks that have DACA right now.

     

    And so, again, I don't think that impacts what the courts decide, but I do— I am hopeful that it's going to be persuasive to the folks that can and arguably should be intervening even before we have the court talk about an outcome?

     

     

     

    [00:18:59.22] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Yeah, let me not get away so quickly— But you know since Hannon issued this decision I mean following up on Cristina's logic if you accept that the current standing on Supreme Court or President authority you must do it—you have a lot of authority but you must do it right. Since the Supreme Court last there is now a new rule on DACA—it took the administration time to issue it so you could argue that the new rule does beef up the administration's position in defense of DACA.

     

     

     

    [00:19:31.19] - Kristie De Peña

    You don't see it that way? You know, I think that it was a good message. I think it was the right message, and I truthfully think it was the only message that the administration could have put out there. I don't see personally that there was really anything that they could have done administratively that would have changed what's happening, what we're anticipating in the Fifth Circuit. I think that there was a possibility that if they'd gone even further potentially in that rule, that Judge Hanen could have come back and lifted his own stay on the current policy that it's allowing renewals to continue. I think it was the only move for the administration to make. But again, it reinforces this idea that we now know there's, you know, just boatloads of evidence that we all know about in this room that talk about the value of Dreamers, the impact on the United States of having DACA recipients come here and work here, you know, all the teachers that we have. I mean, all of these things are narratives that I know that you're all very familiar with, and I think that that was kind of the only move.

     

    I don't think that it's going to change in any way. The outcome of the courts.

     

     

     

    [00:20:45.24] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So Cristina, what's your view as a lawyer? I mean, the fact that, as you put, that the Supreme Court is looking at explain it to us well, and this rule essentially does that, doesn't it fortify DACA better than before?

     

     

     

    [00:21:00.18] - Cristina Rodriguez

    It certainly fortifies DACA, and that's the word that was used, I believe, in the executive order, and provides more context for the policy, which applies to the same people to whom it originally applied. I tend to agree, though, that its road in the court will be— in the courts generally, but will be rocky at best. The variable I would introduce is the possibility that the Supreme Court will apply this so-called major questions doctrine that it has been developing over the last several years and used in an environmental case this past term to say that the EPA had enacted rules that were not expressly authorized by Congress but addressed a major question of social economic significance. The way in which it might apply is not to the, the concept of enforcement forbearance altogether. I, I have some hope that that will be regarded, even if it's on a categorical basis, as something that is within the executive's authority. But with respect to work authorization, and I think that the— and the question is whether the fact that the work authorization rule has been in place since the 1980s and is just being applied to this new category of people will be sufficient.

     

    And even though this is not on all fours with the way the major questions doctrine has been used, because it involves the extent an extension of a rule and not necessarily an interpretation of a statute, it might be the case that the court will say that rule contemplated ad hoc small-scale authorizations for people who didn't otherwise have authorization under the statute, but DACA contemplates something on an entirely distinct scale. And without some kind of congressional expression on that question, it's not within the administration's authority to do that. I, I do think that would be incredibly disruptive, but something along those lines is not outside of the realm of possibility. And, you know, I think it was alluded to before, that is somewhat of the roadmap that Chief Justice Roberts gave in the Regents decision itself. And I think they're probably just going to drive right down that road if it gets to them. Can I jump on that quickly?

     

     

     

    [00:23:24.19] - Kristie De Peña

    Sure, quickly. Yeah, very quickly. I think that you're calling out something that's so important, Cristina, which is the elephant in the room here, right? That there has been no congressional freedom of expression here. I know everyone in this room knows that, but it's worth repeating. It's worth bearing a little bit, spending a little bit of time on it because this doesn't actually have to be a question before the courts. We don't actually have to be thinking about the major questions doctrine and the scope of executive authority in this way if Congress was willing to act on something that there has been widespread consensus about across political lines for for a decade and they've just failed to do so.

     

     

     

    [00:24:01.24] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So wear your political hat now. And I know you spend your time in the right of center politics. So we have, I have argued at least that all branches of our government have been saved by the other branch on the DACA. That Congress doesn't need to act because as long as it's litigation and they have enough protection, we really don't need to act. But they can cannot be pushed down very far. At the end, if the Supreme Court rules on DACA and rules it unlawful, that's the end of the road on the can. So at that point, what kind of pressure will be put on members of Congress, especially the Republicans, given the moral challenge of the DACA recipients?

     

     

     

    [00:24:46.09] - Kristie De Peña

    It's a very good question, and it's a very hard one to answer. I mean, ideally, the answer is that it will be a lot of pressure, and it will be so much pressure that is persuasive to act, but of course, we don't actually know if it is going to be persuasive enough. I'm sure that it's going to rely on whatever exit timeframe that either the Fifth Circuit or the Supreme Court comes up with. I'm sure it's going to depend on what the timeline for deportations may or may not look like. So all of those questions sort of outstanding. I do think that there is a very, very small chance small window that Congress could act in, in the next handful of weeks on something that is extraordinarily narrow in this space. But there are so many poison pills out there that could potentially derail any kind of negotiations among, you know, Republicans and Democrats. And of course, we're hearing about them front and center this week, and I'm sure that we'll touch on them a little bit later. But, you know, if we try to tackle big questions on immigration reform, like anything on asylum, I would probably propose is the end of negotiations and really stops any kind of potentially narrow fix on a congressional solution for DACA.

     

    So, you know, I would never come up here and say that the window is closed forever. I always think that there is a little bit of hope, but I think that it is dwindling, and I think that, you know, potentially a new Republican Congress next year is going to be very unlikely to be persuaded by the ending of this program. Okay, Suzanne, now on to you.

     

     

     

    [00:26:36.11] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So, you know, we used to think of Arizona as the ground zero on immigration in the last 10 years on state action, and now Texas has essentially become the government in exile for the Trump administration to challenge everything that the Obama administration is doing. And no one watches Texas as closely as you do. Could you tell us what the hell is going on in Texas? Is Governor Abbott just walking into a vacuum created by the inaction by Congress, or is he really a proxy for the Trump administration, or does it really reflect the politics of Texas?

     

     

     

    [00:27:15.22] - Suzanne Gamboa

    I think you can answer almost all of those with a yes, although maybe might change the proxy, change the proxy word just because I don't think Greg Abbott would like it very much. He wants to be his own man. And really, I mean, I want to answer that question with telling all of you all I've done this for a long time and so much so that I think I actually kind of got tired of the intransigence on immigration, which I, I covered a lot. Um, and, and then actually ended up leaving Washington after 18 years and going back to Texas to try to cover things in the field and get a real idea of what was going on in the ground and what's really happening, which is where I started. I was El Paso correspondent and for the Associated Press for a while. In that time, Greg Abbott, he was— I don't know if any of you all know, he was the Attorney General of Texas. And it was interesting to see the Attorney General talking today and then think about him, but he once spoke of immigrants as crime victims. He would— excuse me— and he would use his office to protect them.

     

    He protected them against notarios. He protected them against wage theft. He once— he's been credited in, I think, that like about around 2007, something like that, to— for stopping a slate of anti-immigrant bills in the legislature. And he once said— um, actually not once, but had said it for a number of times that immigration enforcement was not Texas's job. So what's the pivot point? Well, years later, about 2014, Texas has changed itself. So it's not just Governor Abbott, but Texas itself, which was a, um, a Republic— had its Republican streak, was more business-oriented, and that was kind of its pride point, that, that we were about, um, uh, that we being Texas, uh, were about, you know, being a place where business could thrive. There was— but there was always a super conservative wing of the Republican Party that was very much based on the abortion issue, um, and where they once, you know, rejected Kay Bailey Hutchison as a delegate, uh, for the convention. And, um, and George W. Bush stood with her and took some backlash. And, and, and that has continued into his, his nephew, who's not accepted by the far right of what is now the Republican Party.

     

    And this has become his base, and this is now where his immigration policy comes from and has brought us to years later as you go down the line, as it has gotten harder and hardened and hardened more and more. There's been different iterations of what is now called Operation Lone Star. Rick Perry did his versions of them when he was governor. But this is like the newest and probably one of the, as they said, I think, in a description of this panel, the most muscly one that we're seeing right now. As a reporter, I mean, you know, it's my job to hear people from both sides. And when I was in El Paso and I lived there, and this was in the early '80s, you know, you— I would see Latinos who— Mexicanos or whatever— that lived on the border, and their homes were broken into by— I don't want to call them gangs because they weren't organized, but they were young guys that came and they would do property theft. And so they were supportive of having more enforcement from the Border Patrol to stop this. Um, at the same time, you know, we, we had the farm work, a lot of farm worker stuff there going on.

     

    And, um, anyway, so, um, you know, this is all, um, uh, been a change in, in what's going on, uh, politically. It's, it's, it's been a bigger, uh, issue. What you see right now with Operation Lone Star, the equivalent, I think, of the, um, the folks that that had the property theft are the ranchers who are complaining. I've not seen the complaints. I've not witnessed the actual damage. Other reporters have that. And I sat in— I listened in on a hearing that was just held in Eagle Pass, Texas, to decide whether or not more money should go to Operation Lone Star, which is already at about $4 billion. And they were talking about— Yeah, yeah. Let me— I was about to get to that. A lot of these ranchers were talking about the damage to their fences, holes cut in them. Immigrants crossing through their ranches. And what you have to imagine is there's this just kind of open space out there and people don't know where they are. They don't know they're on private property or whatever, but Operation Lone Star that the governor has set up brings— at its basic level is he's deployed 1,000 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard to the border.

     

    The troopers were initially to stop stopped people who were crossing the border and coming on private land and, and using the state law criminal trespass to prosecute them. They're to be prosecuted under, um, that, um, state misdemeanor. There are enhancements to it if it's on agricultural property. I think it bumps it to a, a Class B, and then if another crime is committed, it's a Class A and a felony. Oftentimes these are people who are lost. They're looking for water. They get it how they can, whether that's entering a home, a hunting shack that might be the ranch. And some of that is leading to other kinds of charges against these people. There's also a lot more traffic patrol on the back roads and on the roads of the small towns that are on the border, particularly in a city called Brackettville, Del Rio, Eagle Pass. And people are being stopped. One of the last stories I wrote was about the numerous people that were our local citizens and are being stopped by the Department of Public Safety and being— not only are they being asked, where are you going? Hey, your taillight's out, by the way.

     

    Where are you going? You know, where did you come from? Why are you on the road? Who are your passengers? Texas is a state where you don't have to identify as a passenger, you know, turn over your ID card, etc. And they're demanding that of passengers. If you don't, they threaten arrest. People are complaining that they're being searched. Of course, this is one group of people. You also have the ranchers that are seeking protection So anyway, a lot of that is going on. So Abbott has really sort of— I was talking to an attorney. There's a lawsuit that was filed against this and because of the many civil rights issues that are going on in this. And one of the things they point out in the lawsuit is not only is this going on, but he's also gone so far as to what the counties— because the counties are empowered to do a lot of things, they have created their own judges and picked their own judges to decide the prosecutions, decide, you know, the cases of the criminal trespass or whatever. So the county judge, which is the executive officer of a county, is the person who hears the case.

     

    But because there were so many cases that this county of about 3,000 people was not prepared for, many more cases than they would ever get in a year. Um, they appointed some retired judges. The retired judges that were initially appointed were not ruling in the way they wanted them to. They were cognizant of civil rights, etc., and were dismissing cases. So the guy in charge of them, uh, dismissed them and brought in the ones that would rule the way he wanted them to. And so you have this whole system. It's not just judges, it's where they're detaining people, how they're doing it, that, um, an attorney expressed to me was a a separate criminal justice system for immigrants. That's going on in Texas right now.

     

     

    [00:35:03.05] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Great. And then, so is busing just an inheritor of the Lone Star operation? Is this the most recent chapter? I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. The busing of immigrants. Oh, yes.

     

     

    [00:35:13.19] - Suzanne Gamboa

    I'm sorry. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. That's also a prong of it. And, you know, it's a political year. He's up for reelection. He was at 1.5 points separated from the Democrat. He's now at 9 points from the latest Dallas Morning News UT Tyler poll. And, you know, he's tried a lot of things. So I don't know if you remember that he tried to shut down— well, not shut down. He tried to reinspect some of the trucks coming across the many, many bridges that we have in Texas. And it just created such a backup. And then there was such an outcry. And the Mexicans, you know, protested and it affected the bottom line. I think there was about 4— anyway, millions lost in commerce. And so he didn't do it. He stopped. After the immigrants died in the trailer, the— what was it? 52 people in the back of the tractor-trailer truck. He announced that he was going to do strike teams to inspect tractor-trailer rigs. I haven't seen anything yet. I haven't done any of the reporting to look for it because I do a lot of other things too. But it right away created some— was problematic because the state does not have the authority to open up a truck.

     

    So there was a lot of questions about how are they going to do this. So I don't know if the busing was— is to move on from that, but it's clear, you know, Abbott is looking for the attention. What's interesting, if I could just say, about Martha's Vineyard is up to this point, you know, I've been wondering, like, is, you know, the whole immigration thing just not going to be an issue in this election? Like, is it just kind of nobody cares? Um, yes, I know Republicans care from their end, but, you know, we were showing it among Latino voters, like, number 5 on the list of what they care about, and This, I think, is— they want it elevated because they want people against it. But I think also, you will— it's hitting the people who don't like— are more humanitarian, don't want to see this kind of thing.

     

     

    [00:37:21.23] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So let's stick to Cristina. Let's stick to busing for a second because it has just garnered the country's attention so much. So in the past, we used to kind of think of— I'm just asking you as one of the country's best experts on federalism. We used to think about Republican states going after Democratic administrations or Democratic states going after Republican administrations. Now here's the first time you have states going against each other. And you could call it sort of, you know, a civil war going on between states. Pardon the expression. How unprecedented is it? Either in immigration or in any— in our federal system of government in general?

     

     

    [00:38:08.08] - Cristina Rodriguez

    Well, there's a long history of disagreements among states and differences of view and different relationships to the federal government among the states. It dates back to the 19th century when there were some states on the Eastern Seaboard that tried to adopt their own deportation laws at the same time that there were states in the now Midwest trying to recruit immigrants for settlement purposes. And it might have been less pitched and in direct conflict with one another, but the very different approaches that states have taken through their laws and policies to try to shape immigration to serve their interests is a longstanding dynamic in U.S. history, despite the increased federalization of immigration law since the early 20th century. The, the busing example reminds me a little bit of, or a lot of, the reaction that a number of states had in 2015 to the possibility that Syrian refugees during the major crisis there would be resettled, and the declaration by people like Mike Pence, who was the governor of Indiana, and others that they would refuse resettlement. That was also conflict with other states per se, and again a conflict with the federal government, but it was a political stance taken to try to resist what they believe to be the implications of lax immigration policy that is not just the fault of the federal government, but is abetted by states that purport to be sanctuaries or to want to recruit immigrants because they fit into the way that their economies function or the way their societies are structured.

     

    And so in that sense, it's part of the long tradition. I hesitate to call what's happening now federalism. That gives a little bit too grandiose a term for it. It's more like political gamesmanship. But it's a part of a long tradition of states trying to set an agenda through very politically incendiary tactics that often have anti-humanitarian consequences. So just clearly, the key issue in this case is the humanitarian effects of what's going on for no good reason other than to make a political point. Yeah.

     

     

    [00:40:21.24] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So, Kristie, on the other side, Democrats have been making noise, various governors, that they're looking at ways to go after Texas legally. So the attorney general of Connecticut, who was here this morning, very diplomatically said that they're looking at all kinds of possible claims, civil, criminal, and everything else. I know you thought about this. Can you think of what the legal issues this thing raises and whether any of them have legs or no?

     

     

    [00:40:51.15] - Kristie De Peña

    You know, I, I think it raises a, a lot of questions and it sounds like a lot of people are thinking about those questions. We've heard folks bring up, um, uh, potential human trafficking charges, kidnapping charges, run-of-the-mill fraud charges. Um, the Bexar County Sheriff is looking at, uh, looking at criminal charges himself. So there's a lot of eyeballs on this, which I think is important. But what I kind of also think is an important way to think about this is actually looking at some of the costs that these states are talking about. Because if you push Governor DeSantis or you push Governor Abbott enough, it always comes back to the fact that they are sharing or they are taking on the lion's share of responsibility for processing all of these asylum seekers. And so I think it's incumbent upon us to, as a nation, come out and say that we do want to better share some of the responsibility. But I also think that we need to be forthright about the fact that the federal government is not ignoring the fact that Texas bears this lion's share. Just this year, they gave Texas $22 million that was explicitly focused on intercepting and handling some of the asylum seekers that are coming across the border.

     

    By my calculations that I've read from great reporters, they're saying that roughly Texas has spent something along the lines of $12 million just busing and moving migrants. And so when you're thinking about the dollar amounts here, it immediately sort of detracts from this this claim that this is all about money. It's clearly not, and I think that you're exactly right when you talk about the fact that Governor Abbott is getting a huge political bump from this kind of staging. The other important thing that I think comes up on the legal side of things is that the federal government does, to some extent, really demand from state and local enforcement some kind of cooperation, and it often costs it costs them a lot of money to do so. And that's why in the past, even as recently as 2017, we saw sanctuary jurisdictions in states like Florida and in states like Texas. There was just a recent holding in Los Angeles County by a court that barred ICE from relying on their records to issue detainers because they were so, unreliable. And the federal government wasn't paying for the costs of those settlements that had to be paid out to all of these people that were improperly detained via an ICE detainer.

     

    It was Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And that's happening across the board in a lot of these states. So I think it's kind of a push and pull from some of this. But I do think that, you know, if we're looking at the silver lining of having some of these discussions, We are starting to think about the way that the U.S. as a country can better respond to some of these needs, not just relying on the states of sort of first asylum that we talk about in the context of a global regime and thinking about how the U.S. can better respond as a whole to this need, because there is a way to respond efficiently and effectively and humanely to the needs that we're seeing. Great.

     

     

    [00:44:19.17] - Suzanne Gamboa

    Can I throw in something real quick? I just, I think it's real important too, to that, and the Texas, um, situation, um, that there had— there wasn't a lot of transparency on what the results were or have been on Operation Lone Star. And if you have a chance to look for the article that the Texas Tribune, Marshall Project, and ProPublica did, um, really investigating the numbers that were out there, and they found that like some of the criminal drug, uh, stats or cases that were connected by the governor's office to, you know, their, their success stories were actually had nothing to do with the border. They were, they were totally unassociated with it. So they had to like take some 2,000 cases out of their numbers because it wasn't— they weren't valid. That's not to say there's not some validity to what they're trying to do and the damage that some people suffer, but there's also in fact a federal program to help ranchers who do suffer damage. So as Kristie said, there are programs that are trying to recognize that there's an issue out there. Great.

     

     

    [00:45:24.24] - Muzaffar Chishti

    So, let me stay with you. And again, just drawing your expertise as a veteran observer of Latino politics. So one of the points made in our panel this morning was that just because a lot of people, I can't say majority, but overwhelming numbers of migrants arriving at the border these days are from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, that that's going to change the perception of people coming to the border, especially among Republicans. How do you see this playing in Latino politics today?

     

     

    [00:45:56.14] - Suzanne Gamboa

    Well, it's an important issue in Latino politics because, as you all know, there is this sort of effort after seeing how Trump did in the last election to try to gain more Latinos on the, on the Republican side, and, and that's kind of made Democrats scared. Um, and, and some are saying that they are trying to go after them as well, better than they have before. Um, it's— what's really important to know is that in Texas there always has been this higher percentage of Hispanics or Latinos who would vote Republican on certain races, and that's all you need. You could go as high as 40% or 39%. Governor Abbott or Perry would get that percentage, and that was all they needed to win their race. And there are races out there, it may not matter on the national scale because you still have 60% who are voting Democrat, but if you are a Democrat, but if you, um, but if, if you look at the, the smaller level, the lower level, it's, it's changing things. And what's really important about these immigration, um, policies is that they are happening at the county level. Greg Abbott's, um, Operation Lone Star wouldn't work without the cooperation of the Kinney County attorney— I mean, Kinney County judge and the Kinney, uh, Val Verde County who all agreed to— went in with him on declaring a disaster declaration.

     

    So, you know, to have the Latino vote shift even, or— which I don't think is shift, I think it's more Republicans who haven't voted in the past because it was so Democrat in certain areas and are now participating more in primaries and in the election, and then some may be shifting, you know, that can make a difference in those races where those people are coming up with the policies. And some of these counties at least in Texas where you are seeing these different numbers on Latino voters, are some of the poorest in the country, and they have struggled for years, and the best jobs are with the Border Patrol and ICE. They offer benefits. They, you know, offer a way for them to send their kids to college, and they already play into what is something of a streak, a cultural streak of patriotism, because for those that are not so far removed as immigrants immigrants, you know, this is a way to show you're truly American. And that this whole issue, I think, does play to their— to those strengths and weaknesses, whatever you want to call them. I think it's still a wild card to see how Venezuelans and Cubans and Colombians are going to react to seeing the deportations and the busing.

     

    We did a quick story after Martha's Vineyard, a colleague and I, and, um, just trying to get a beat on the, the Latin— the Venezuelan community. It's definitely very split. Some people think that they're not this, they're chavistas from the Chávez government, and so they're not the same as them. They stayed behind and now they're trying to come. And so those are, they're calling them delinquents and whatever else. And while others are quite compassionate and they're saying, how can you be against a communist country and against communism? And then these people are fleeing and you're sending them, trying to send them back.

     

     

    [00:49:07.23] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Thank you. So in about 5 minutes, we'll go to questions, but let me ask each of you a question somewhat to broaden the scope of what we've been talking so far. So back to the Supreme Court. I mean, if we see the challenge of the border, whether it's chaotic or more, you know, whatever you want to call it, but certainly the perception that the border is out of control. How do you, just as a Supreme Court watcher, think that that affects the Supreme Court and its rulings? Is it essentially— another way of asking you, is the Supreme Court immune from sub-development like this, or is it highly influenced by developments like this?

     

     

    [00:49:51.18] - Cristina Rodriguez

    I think it's probably somewhere in between, Muz. I would never describe the Supreme Court as immune from what's happening in the world, though they often will— individual justices will make statements like the consequences of our opinions are irrelevant to us, or what public public opinion consists of is irrelevant to us. People like to point to a very poignant example that led to a sea change in the law, and that is in 2001, 2002, when the Supreme Court was about to hear its first case, or maybe it was one of the subsequent cases about detention at Guantanamo after 9/11, the photos from Abu Ghraib came out. And that, that concretized in the minds of the justices, or so the narrative goes, the potential consequences, severe disorienting consequences of the so-called war on terror at the time. And that led to a restraint on the executive's power in the case the court heard. That's speculation. But the timing and the way in which the opinion came out that was somewhat of a surprise is suggestive. I do think, though, that it could cut both ways, right? I think for some people, the recognition of the humanitarian consequences of the influx at the border and the limitations on the government's authority might lead them to grant the executive more leeway to read parole generously, that sort of thing.

     

    But I do think you also see in the opinions, particularly of someone like Justice Alito, this concern that, that Sandra was talking about before about the effects of immigration on crime rates and the fear that people abscond if they're not detained, that, that's there as a justification in some of these lower court opinions on the enforcement priorities memo as a reason to not allow the executive to evade what the court believes to be a mandatory detention directive from Congress in the statute. And a lot of the court's detention jurisprudence, again, written by Justice Alito, the concern about someone's— allowing someone to be released and then the effects on the states of crime and disorder and general need to protect welfare and the distribution of resources from citizens to caring for immigrants affects the way that they perceive the executive's authority. And you don't have to look beyond the opinions themselves to see that. And so it's hard to imagine that on some level it won't— what's happening at the border won't affect the way decisions get made. It will just depend on who's looking at the data and what they bring to that as part of their priors in the first place.

     

    And then whether or not they choose to acknowledge it or shroud it in some view about what the government has or has not shown as part of the evidence to support its policies.

     

     

    [00:52:55.24] - Muzaffar Chishti

    Great. And Kristie, to you. So this is a more overall picture. So you are one of our few people who has some understanding of the pulse of the Republican lawmakers. So on this optimistic and pessimistic spectrum, in the short term, medium term, where do you see kind of a sweet spot between center-right and center-left coming to some agreement on immigration?

     

     

     

    [00:53:25.18] - Kristie De Peña

    Well, I think at some point, you know, they're going to be forced to have to kind of grapple with what is happening at the border. So, you know, I think, you know, we all saw border numbers came out yesterday. We're seeing a pretty staggering change from the kinds of arrivals that are happening on our southern border. I think we're about to see Venezuelans and Cubans and Nicaraguans surpass the combined total of Mexicans and Salvadorans and Hondurans that have been crossing just over the last few years. And I think that that is going to be kind of the next big push for potentially changing the way that we're handling asylum seekers on the southern border, or at least fingers crossed. You know, I think as we look into a next Congress. We're going to be talking a lot about those issues. Republicans want to talk a lot about labor issues, which isn't just a Republican issue, but is also, you know, important for Democrats. We're going to be thinking a lot about competition and in particular competition with China. And of course, you know, security is always on top of mind for Republicans in particular. I do want to say, because you mentioned That last night Congress cleared a standalone immigration bill which defies all logic, uh, but it was the, the Bridging the Gap for New Americans Act, which basically allows, uh, DOL to examine some of the factors that keep immigrants and refugees from finding employment with their foreign degrees or their foreign credentials.

     

    It's a very small and a very limited bill, but I think that it points to, you know, this constant idea that there, there may be a sliver of hope to move something. And if it takes passing kind of small bills like this to build the trust that we know that lawmakers need in order to, you know, do the kind of give and take on, on certain bigger pieces of immigration reform, then we're headed in the right direction. So if I had to end on an up note, that's the one that I would choose.

     

     

    [00:55:42.23] - Muzaffar Chishti

    We like that. We like sweet spots. So people who want to ask questions can start lining themselves. In the meantime, I'll ask Suzanne the last question, which I really cannot help asking you, just having talked to you as a prominent reporter, as just a reporter covering immigration for the last many years. How have you seen, how different is covering immigration today than it was then when you entered the field?

     

     

    [00:56:11.10] - Suzanne Gamboa

    I, I, um, I, it's a good question. I, I mark my, use the marker as before 9/11 and after 9/11 because I was, you know, I was covering, started covering immigration in 2000 up in Washington. And I remember going to hearings and, and, um, the members, um, particularly in the Senate were just climbing all over the to talk about their immigration stories, and my grandfather came, and my great-grandfather came, and whatever. Brownback, Senator McCain at the time, you know, really being moved by a story of a young girl and her bloated body showing up in the river in Arizona, and that affecting him wanting to come up with some kind of immigration reform. But right after 9/11, everything just shifted. I mean, it was instant. And everybody who was coming was a terrorist, and we had to stop everybody in the Patriot Act. And I think it has just gone diminished and diminished from there. And so I kind of, I, you know, I'm waiting for that point where that Kristie's talking about where, you know, I was around when the whole enchilada was proposed. I don't know if you all know about that, but that was a congressional immigration reform that Bush proposed.

     

    And I guess maybe the next step is, is, um, what do you call it, piecemeal.

     

     

    [00:57:26.04] - Muzaffar Chishti

    That's— Thank you. So let's go to the question and answer session. And.

     

    [[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

     

    [00:57:34.23] - Speaker 5

    We're working. Hey. Hi. Good to see you all. Theresa Brown, Bipartisan Policy Center. I want to get back to sort of the focus on the courts. And I think you raised earlier on sort of where we are in sort of the politicization of the courts. And I do think there's been polling out there that say that, you know, the public is, you know, thinking that the courts are more politicized than they used to be. Trying to think back to the origins of where we got now, I mean, certainly there was a move on the right for a long time talking about activist courts, and very upset that what they thought were very liberal judges were moving things in one direction, and now we sort of see the progressive side claiming the same. Okay, another one. And our, you know, Connecticut Attorney General this morning sort of said, well, yeah, the shoe's on the other foot right now. And it makes me wonder whether, at least in the immigration world, even though this is not unique to immigration, we need to think more strategically about the litigation that we do take on in the current environment.

     

     

    [00:58:37.08] - Speaker 5

    Not just because of we don't know where all the precedents are going to go, but thinking ahead to, okay, if the other side, if we have a change in administration and the other side starts suing, can these precedents be used against us? As you mentioned about, you know, the cases in MPP. So I think that's something I just wanna think about in the context of where we are today with immigration litigation in the courts. Thank you.

     

     

    [00:59:04.19] - Speaker 1

    Cristina, you're the closest to— 

     

     

    [00:59:06.24] - Speaker 2

    Sure, I have a few thoughts about that problem, but I do think it's an intractable one. There are people who, especially at the level of Supreme Court litigators, who increasingly give a great deal of thought about whether to pursue a case all the way to the court with a view to what kind of precedent it might set. That, of course, doesn't address the question of what happens in the lower courts. Sorry about the emergency siren passing by, but Yeah. And I think that you cannot evade litigation on these questions altogether. One of the effects of the nationwide injunction and the use of procedural tools that can be done on both sides— doesn't have a particular ideological valence— to stop policy in its tracks has been on the government and the way that it tries to formulate policies to make them as litigation-proof as possible. I think that it does have a constraining effect. You might see less creative use of statutory authority than in the past, but then you also see efforts like a rule, a notice and comment rule to fortify DACA, as opposed to a more elaborate memorandum.

     

     

    [01:00:18.23] - Speaker 2

    In 2012, we would have said there's no reason to send this to notice and comment rulemaking. And so it might not succeed as a strategy, but that is a way to address what's happening in the courts, is to try to satisfy some of those concerns and still get policy through. That will inevitably slow things down, which is part of the dilemma. I think that the problem with the politicization of the courts is one that's tied to deep fissures in our political culture that don't have an obvious solution, and immigration is both contributing to it and being affected by those fissures. I think that courts have always been political. It's not like we are living some dystopian alternative to a neutral past when you had judges who made decisions without regard to ideology. But it does seem to not only have gotten worse, but to be— the courts have become a place where a lot of disputes that might have been resolved in politics are increasingly going. Some of that has to do with inaction in Congress and the fact that a lot of policymaking is happening through the executive branch. And so there's more opportunity to challenge for procedural reasons and other reasons.

     

     

    [01:01:30.23] - Speaker 2

    And so perhaps some of the answer to these problems is for Congress to act more. But that again is inhibited by the divides that exist in our political culture that are driving a lot of the dynamics that we're talking about. So where the solution lies, I'm not sure, but all of these things are related.

     

     

    [01:01:49.21] - Speaker 1

    Great. Thank you. Let me take a question there.

     

     

    [01:01:53.21] - Speaker 6

    Yes, my name is Abel Núñez. I'm the executive director of the Central American Resource Center, and we actually are one of the organizations that have been receiving the buses from Texas and Arizona. I do want to sort of ask a question about, you know, a lot of politicians do good things with bad intentions. What both governors are doing are for political reasons, but for some of the immigrants on the buses, you know, has been an incredible help, right? Because it's getting closer to, to where they want to be. Uh, is this a model of how we should receive immigrants, and what would that look like? Because ultimately it's about everybody sharing the burden, right? So you have the states helping them get to where they need to go in the interior of the, of the country. You have the cities having to provide integration services. And isn't that what we would want? And how— what would that look like if instead of using it as a political stunt, it was actually something that was funded at all levels, at the federal level, at the state level, and at the local level? And what do you think— and I know we're talking dream here, but what would that look like, and what will be the potential hurdles, you know, in terms of sort of the legality of that?

     

     

    [01:03:08.24] - Speaker 1

    Suzanne, what do you think Governor Abbott was hoping for, or—

     

     

    [01:03:12.01] - Speaker 4

    Oh, no. No. But I— I think he's right, and I think there are people that are saying, hey, it's great, you know, for the salvadoreños. I mean, I know that there are many in this area of the country, and, you know, having, you know, I've always, I knew the process was usually they would go to a nonprofit and the nonprofit would call, they would have a phone number, they would call that person, try to get them to buy them a bus ticket, or if they didn't have it, they would use their money. The nonprofits only have so much. There are only so many nonprofits working in Texas, and their resources are strained. So there are people that are saying, hey, if he wants to send them closer to where they are, and my understanding is that like when they sent them to New York, the asylum courts in New York are much more likely to have a higher granting of asylum rate than in Texas. So I've asked that question too. I mean, I've asked that question, you know, And thinking about it as a reporting story is, is this the way it should be done?

     

     

    [01:04:13.10] - Speaker 4

    Because I know that advocates were against detention centers, even when the Obama administration had what it called a family center. So what can be acceptable to advocates and to the other side?

     

     

    [01:04:26.23] - Speaker 1

    Kristie, I have two questions from online. I think they both go to you. One is sort of— I'm not sure anyone knows the answer, but the question is to you. When exactly will When will the court decide about DACA? And two is that, why do you think that Hanen might have lifted her stay if the administration had gone further?

     

     

    [01:04:49.24] - Speaker 3

    Sure, so I mean, the answer to the first question is I have no idea. I think that anybody's guess is as good as any guess that I could come up with. There is some idea floating around that we might hear from the Fifth Circuit in the next couple of weeks, weeks, and then the Supreme Court would likely hear it in 2023 sometime, but I don't think that there's any kind of clear metric or idea that we could use behind when we'll see any of those decisions. I think that Judge Heymann is still a kind of wild card in this whole process. There is certainly a scenario by which, you know, if, I think if the administration had responded too strongly or tried to to expand the DACA program and rewriting the regulation, that Judge Hanen could have lifted his own stay. He's certainly allowed to do that. And, you know, for me, that's always sort of been this kind of niggling concern in the back of my mind that we could immediately stop having DACA renewals. And that's certainly not something that I think would be good or smart policy. And of course, you know, there is, there are scenarios, you know, in the way the way that cases work through courts, where this could end up going back to a district court judge who could then decide to do whatever he wants to do on, you know, continuing a stay, not continuing a stay, applying it to renewals, processing the new applications.

     

     

    [01:06:11.21] - Speaker 3

    I mean, whatever it is that they want to do. So I think that there's just a lot of question marks about what we're going to see in this ruling, and it's a worst-case scenario because we all have to just wait and see and then move as fast as we possibly can as sort of advocates in this space to try and convince lawmakers that they need to act simultaneous to all of this court action. And I think that's the biggest takeaway.

     

     

    [01:06:38.06] - Speaker 1

    I know there's one more question, but I'll go to one more question online because it does go to MPP. And Cristina, I think you're online for this just because you're the closest we have here who has no something that the administration may actually be doing. So what is the current status of MPP after the Supreme Court sent it back to the, to the court in terms of its actual implementation?

     

     

    [01:07:00.18] - Speaker 2

    So I, I have no particular insight into operational details, but there is an effort to wind it down, and, and that entails, uh, when people appear for their, uh, court dates, then they're taken out of the program, um, and then they can proceed with their whatever processes it is that they're in inside the United States. And there's, of course, no— there are no new enrollments in the program. That's the status quo. I think there's some concern that it's not happening quickly enough. But it is a logistical challenge to figure out how to get people to the country. And it's possible it could be done more rapidly than it is being done now. But It's— at least the administration is touting what it's doing now is a bit more orderly and organized than the original effort to begin unwinding MPP. But the case is back with the district court. And if the district court decides that the administration was arbitrary and capricious in its decision to rescind MPP, then in a way we're back where we started. I think the one thing that I didn't mention before that might make the outcome in this case different different than what we might otherwise expect with the application of arbitrary capricious review is that one of the reasons that the Supreme Court cited for reversing the district court was— and criticizing the use of the injunction— was the effect it had on foreign policy of the United States.

     

     

    [01:08:34.05] - Speaker 2

    The idea that a district court could force the federal government into negotiations with Mexico and force two countries to adopt a policy that neither wants seems like separation of powers run amok. And I, I think the court's recognition of the foreign affairs dimension of this might be enough, maybe not for the district court to say, okay, this is something that the executive branch has the authority to do, but certainly for the Supreme Court to say, whatever we think about arbitrary capricious review when it comes to domestic policy, this is a policy that we cannot force upon the federal government, which is, will which would be the effect of declaring the rescission arbitrary and capricious. So if I had to predict how it would all work out in the end, that's what I would say. And so that means that it makes sense for the administration to keep working on unwinding it, for advocates to put whatever pressure is necessary to make it happen more quickly, and to try to shift attention to adjudicating cases inside the United States under the new asylum rule and otherwise.

     

     

    [01:09:37.01] - Speaker 1

    So that will have to be the last question, but please go ahead.

     

     

    [01:09:40.13] - Speaker 7

    Okay, great.

     

     

    [01:09:43.15] - Speaker 7

    Um, hi, so my question for y'all was, um, you were mentioning that there might be a change in the way some conservatives talk about immigrants when they're— if they're— when we're having that shift to mostly Nicaraguans and Venezuelans and such, people escaping a failed communist regimes. My question is how wise that is, because it's happened in the past, right, with Cubans especially. But I think we're still more likely to get mostly people escaping climate change and events like that. I've definitely talked to clients who, you know, hurricanes a couple years ago from Central America went by and destroyed the house, and then now they're here. So I, I don't know how much I want to focus on that. It's not always the case, and the people escaping those situations maybe deserve help too.

     

     

    [01:10:37.21] - Speaker 4

    Yeah, I just want to clarify that, um, I don't think that there's going to be a shift. I think that— I know that there are people now saying, um, you know, that they're coming from communist countries, and so they're criticizing Senator Marco Rubio or Díaz-Balart, who are always, um, you know, talking about communism and against it and, you know, whatever. And, and they said, listen, you can't be saying one and then denying these people entry here. So I think, you know, I, I also think that, you know, this— we're dealing with asylees, asylum seekers, and the, the language has so changed on who these people are. I mean, there used to be sort of these distinctions made, and now people that don't want to see them coming are sort of lumping them all and saying they're all, um, you know, there you know, what the words that they use. You know, I hate to— and I think that has a lot to do with, you know, some of the extremism, the white supremacy that is a reality in all of our debate that we're having now that, you know, infiltrates every part of immigration from, you know, from, you know, just the vigilantes to the agents.

     

     

    [01:11:48.08] - Speaker 4

    You know, it exists. And so I don't know that people will ever come— there are some people who will never come to accept this as a reality. It really just comes down to what these policies are. I don't get to write opinion, but as an observer of this for so long, I have wondered when we're going to come to the point where we no longer think of immigration as static, that it just happens, we're going to pass a bill, and it's all going to be solved. And I think that happens a lot. People— in general.

     

     

    [01:12:18.16] - Speaker 1

    And applause. We will conclude this panel. Help me, help me thank Suzanne Gamboa, Kristie De Peña, and Cristina Rodriguez for an excellent conversation. We could go all day, but the governor is here, and I would expect— please, all of you, stay seated while we change this configuration here for the governor to come. And thank you so much all. And we'll see you soon.

2:45 p.m. ET

Afternoon Keynote: The Hon. Asa Hutchinson, Governor, State of Arkansas

3:30 p.m. ET -   Break
 

3:45 p.m. ET

A Glass Half Full or Half Empty: Humanitarian Protection Developments
U.S. individuals, communities, and organizations have rallied to welcome tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated from Kabul amid a chaotic U.S. withdrawal one year ago and to sponsor more than 100,000 Ukrainians who fled after Russia’s invasion. The displacement crises have led to policy innovations, including community and private sponsorship of Ukrainians.

How are these responses to displacement crises different from other humanitarian crises? And what might the implications be for the U.S. system of humanitarian protection going forward, given the ongoing weaknesses of a resettlement system on track to resettle just one-fifth of refugees targeted for resettlement in 2022? How will refugee policy and integration be affected by the growing use of temporary statuses such as parole (including the resumption of the Cuban and Haitian Family Parole programs) and Temporary Protected Status?

The panel of top experts examined how the resettlement infrastructure was rebounding from major cuts, and where the continuing gaps and needs in the protection system existed.

• Moderator: Anna Gallagher, Executive Director, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC)
• Speakers:
  • Lawrence Bartlett, Director of Refugee Admissions, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, U.S. Department of State
  • Eskinder Negash, President and CEO, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

  • Kit Taintor, Vice President of Policy and Practice, Welcome.US

    Show full transcript

    This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

     

     

    [00:00:04.14] - Anna Gallagher

    My name is Anna Gallagher. I'm the Executive Director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Clinic, and I'm very pleased to moderate this last panel at the conference, A Glass Half Full or Half Empty: Humanitarian Protection Developments. So welcome, and happy to see you all. Uh, and I'm— now I'm pleased to present to you our panelists. Each with deep and rich experience in the field of migration, asylum, and refugee law, policy, practice, operations, as noted in their bios, which you have in the conference program. So at the end is Lawrence Bartlett, Director of Refugee Admissions, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, U.S. Department of State. Welcome, Mr. Bartlett. Thank you. And immediately to his left is Kit Taintor, Vice President of Policy and Practice at WelcomeUSA. Welcome, Kit. And right to my right is Eskinder Negash, President and CEO, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. And welcome, Eskinder. So before starting, I'm going to go back and forth. And prompt questions to our panelists and have them respond to the questions. But before starting, I just wanted to remind folks about what our speakers, some of our speakers said earlier today about the issues that our panelists will address.

     

    Attorney General Tong noted that immigration policy and the fact and experience of immigration are very personal for everyone. This affects real people. And certainly our three panelists know that and have experienced that, uh, and with working with the populations they work with as well. Today's speakers spoke of seeing opportunities among the thousands of migrants and refugees arriving in the United States. They spoke of opportunities for our communities in receiving them. And again, this is precisely what our panelists do. They shared that the largest number of arrivals are coming from communist countries. Does that change the— change the state of play? They suggested that this is a time when we can more clearly explain what asylum is and why it is important. And they agreed on the importance of data-based evidence in preparing for reception and creating effective solutions. One of our speakers reminded us that welcoming large numbers of refugees is not a capacity issue for the Global North. So with that in mind, our panel— panelists will continue to talk of opportunities and opportunities for change. They will examine how the refugee resettlement infrastructure is rebounding from major cuts, where gaps continue, and where opportunities exist to more robustly, effectively, and humanely welcome and receive those seeking protection and refuge in the United States.

     

    So our panelists are going to share their experiences for about 35 minutes, 40 minutes, after which we will reserve some time for questions from the audience, and we look forward to your questions. So with that, we'll start our discussion. Director Bartlett, could you give us a brief overview on refugee admissions for FY 2022, including the number admitted thus far and anticipated by the end of the year?

     

     

    [00:03:41.24] - Lawrence Bartlett

    Sure, let me, um, actually I want to take the word brief out of that because I actually want to do a little bit more if I can, but let me know if I'm going on too long. So a couple things, I want to read just up front a couple of the sentences that we prepared for Secretary Blinken as he was consulting with Congress last week because I think they're really a powerful testimony of this administration's commitment to refugee resettlement. So it reads, the U.S. role as the world's largest humanitarian donor and resettlement country has always been an important marker of our leadership on the world stage. It reflects American generosity and the strong bipartisan commitment to and leading with our values. An integral part of that role has been our ability to welcome those who are persecuted abroad and give refuge and a new life to those fleeing crises around the world. So, you know, one of the questions, you know, is it half full, is it half empty? I would strongly propose that we are half full. Our program, I think, has once again been restored to solid footing. Our arrival numbers this year, the president authorized us— people who are familiar with our program know that the president has the prerogative year by year to indicate a number of refugees who can arrive.

     

    Our target this year was 125,000. We have fallen woefully short of that. I think we will admit about 25,000 by the end of this September. It is not, frankly, unexpected. I think there's been a lot of discussion about the efforts of the last administration and certainly the very low ceilings that led to obviously a system that was pretty underpopulated and under-resourced. So that, I think, has been partially restored and it continues to be restored. It is certainly a high initiative of this administration. But the other thing that we can't forget, most of us sitting here without a mask on, is that we have all been affected by COVID for the last 2.5, 3 years. And refugees were the same. You know, we could not move people, We cannot move people to capital cities to process. So frankly, I would argue the impact of COVID was probably even a larger factor in our lower arrivals this year. We are— we— I will tell people, sometimes it's surprising when you look at our populations. The largest number of refugees as a nationality this year will be coming from the Congo, but the second largest are Syrians, which I think is again a really good note given the policies of this administration really to have an open refugee program to all.

     

    And then Syrians are followed by Burmese, Sudanese, Afghans who came in as refugees, not as parolees, Ukrainians who also came in as refugees, and Guatemalans. So I think again, you see from some of the nationalities that we're working with kind of a high impact and kind of a real emphasis on those we're working with. And then my last point maybe that I'll make is, and I think we can talk about this later, is in addition to the 25,000 that we're bringing, and Eskinder and others of my friends who will argue that that's woefully low, we all need to remember that, you know, this country, and I'm not going to say this government, but this country and our people have brought over 80,000 Afghans to this country, not as refugees this year, but as parolees. And we have about 90,000 Ukrainians who have applied for parole and have been granted it. They have not all yet arrived. I think we have about 55,000 Ukrainians arriving under parole so far. So the lift I think that this administration, and frankly our people and our communities, have experienced over the last year is frankly way beyond 125,000. So I think I will leave it at that.

     

     

    [00:07:48.18] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you, Director Bartlett. And, and could you share a little bit how the responses to the displacement crisis this past year are different from other humanitarian crises?

     

     

    [00:07:59.17] - Lawrence Bartlett

    So I think that obviously leads to Afghans and Ukrainians, which So I've been in this business for, I don't know, maybe 15,000 years. 15,000. It only seems like that some days. Um, 15 years. And I think this is the first year that I've seen an administration that has been so kind of adept and nimble at looking for alternate pathways to bring people to the U.S. And, and I heard a little bit of Governor Hutchinson's speech before, and but looking at the refugee program for what it is, it's amazing. It's a great tool. You know, it has security checks. It has, you know, great anchoring and integration aspects on the back end once people arrive, you know, legal status, both for Afghanistan because of course the evacuation was happening in real time with multiple planes a day coming into places like Qatar, um, and a need to, to really keep people moving through the system, it was quickly decided that people needed to be brought in under parole. And frankly, similar calculus was made for Ukrainians where trying to relieve some of the pressure on our European allies who were very generous hosts of Ukrainians and offer people an opportunity to come to the US.

     

    But again, with some kind of ability to be anchored. And so, and this was a program that was put together by DHS, really allowed people to come in who had sponsorship so they could come in with support, but support from their sponsors, and then apply for parole once they arrive. So they're more temporary. And we know some of the problems that the Afghan program now will have in the sense of people making an adjustment to some kind of permanent status. But they were very conscious decisions made for the kind of extreme environment in which we found ourselves. And again, if we would've waited for the refugee program, not that it's not wonderful and amazing, but it would've taken far longer and we wouldn't have been able to accomplish what we did. And frankly, our resettlement partners have in fact played a leading role in all three of those things. So just the resettlement program itself, but the Afghan program and the Ukrainian program, everybody can still access ORR benefits. PRM put in special measures for Afghans. So people have, on the temporary kind of support side, received a lot of the same services. But now the question will be some, what will be their status on a permanent basis?

     

     

    [00:10:39.14] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you. And then Mr. Negash, could you share your thoughts? On the displacement crisis in the past year and how it's different?

     

     

    [00:10:48.12] - Eskinder Negash

    Sure. Larry was in preschool when this happened, so he doesn't remember, but 1975 and 1978, we did actually bring in a lot of people from Vietnam. Some of them actually stayed in military base in California, in Arkansas, in other places. So this is not the first time that we have accepted people without going through the process. So if I'm not mistaken, I know there's a lot of people here, experts, and who have written on this issue. 1975 was the Vietnamese in Laos and Cambodia. That was really not really the typical refugee processing that we have now. So we have done this. And then if I'm not mistaken, we did also the same thing with Bosnians. And then, you know, we processed them. It was a military base. And then next to that, I think we have done with Kurds. If I'm not mistaken, somewhere in Guam also we processed them. So there is some history of, you know, accepting this emergency resettlement and different models. And then, of course, some of you remember we had 100,000 Cubans who came in also, even though it's a different process again. So we have, we have done this kind of emergency decision to bring in people to the US.

     

    But this is probably the largest humanitarian response to the Afghans in terms of 80,000. The refugee resettlement agencies, we resettled about 80,000 refugees from August to February 15th. So within 5 months, you know, that we did this resettlement. So it is something, you know, I think the resettlement agents are quite proud, and then I think State Department did a lot of creative ways to make sure that— so the creative ways to resettle them. So I'm happy to tell you that even my agency, we have resettled about 10,000 Afghans in addition to the other refugees who's come into the country.

     

     

    [00:12:53.23] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you, Mr. Negash. Ms. Taintor, do you have any thoughts on the responses to the displacement crisis this past year?

     

     

    [00:13:02.16] - Kit Taintor

    Yeah, I want to highlight something that Larry said a little bit earlier is that, you know, this is a glass half full situation. Like, there's been a lot that's been done over the past year. Eskinder just talked about, you know, the 80,000 Afghan evacuees, 10,000 of them through USCRI that have been resettled, and that is amazing. That is a lot of folks that are finding their path here in our local communities that are integrating and that are learning how to thrive. Like, I am super excited about all the work that's been done, but I'm excited about it because it's been done, and I'm excited because it shows what's possible. So the Department of State has done a lot of innovation through Operations Allies Welcome over the past, you know, 12 months or so to include drawing in new partners to the act of welcoming, which I think is really important. And so, you know, there's been different institutional partners that have partnered with resettlement agencies, with the Department of State to welcome Afghans in. That includes groups like Samaritan's Purse, like the Lions Club, like Islamic Relief USA. So organizations that oftentimes have a humanitarian bent but haven't necessarily been involved in refugee resettlement here in the United States.

     

    And that is great that we have these, these iconic and differently politically situated organizations really stepping in and saying, hey, I want to be part of this. I want to be part of the welcoming of Afghans. You know, the other group that has stepped in to welcome Afghans and Ukrainians is everyday Americans, which is incredible. You know, so we have, you know, a number of, you know, and kind of piloted through the Department of State, private sponsorship groups that stood up everywhere from Iowa to South Carolina and said, you know what, I'm really touched by this. I, you know, I'm a veteran. I, you know, moved by my faith, all sorts of different reasons that people stood up and said, you know what, I want to welcome an Afghan into my community, I want to welcome an Afghan as part of my family, and I want to help this Afghan thrive. And we've seen the same thing happen for Ukrainians. So over 120,000 or so everyday Americans have raised their hand and said, I want to participate in these acts of welcoming. You know, the United States government has made it possible for these groups and these individuals to participate, and we've taken advantage of it.

     

    And it's really incredible to see, you know, 200— a commitment from the administration for 200,000 newcomers to come in through parole and to be welcomed into our communities, and be welcomed through traditional partners like USCRI that Eskinder represents, and new partners like Lions or like Samaritan's Purse. And so it's really taken a whole-of-society approach to welcoming over the past year, which makes me really excited. Somebody who comes from wearing two— you know, I've worn a couple of different hats in my professional life to include on sort of the more immigrant integration and the refugee resettlement kind of different paths, and it really makes me excited to see that these opportunities have been laid out for folks to get involved from all walks of life and welcoming folks, welcoming folks with different immigration statuses, but also really welcoming folks into the fabric of local communities where integration really happens. And so there's a lot to celebrate, I think, over the past year and a lot to celebrate in innovation. And I feel like immigrant policy and innovation are not words that are used in the same sentence quite often, but this is a moment in which we can say, you know, DHS and DOS, they have really leaned in with innovation over the past 12 months and made some incredible things happen, not only for, you know, the diaspora communities that are here, here for our veterans communities, but really for our communities of our international partners abroad who deserve our allyship.

     

     

    [00:16:18.24] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you, Ms. Taintor. And just thinking, following up on you saying, um, that we've expanded to new and different partners, um, and it seems, you know, we've heard today that personal stories matter, that people become supportive and join together as communities to welcome people that are different than them. And would you say that this— do you believe this trend will continue, or how can we, um, how can we, uh, create a structure or solutions to, to expand this?

     

     

    [00:16:51.12] - Kit Taintor

    I mean, it's such a great question. I mean, I think that, um, you know, those of us that have been involved in immigrant integration work for a long time understand that it's really rooted in those personal stories, like your speaker earlier today talked about. You know, once you sort of interact and get to know a newcomer, you really become moved by not only their story but their their resilience and their competence and the potential that lies, the potential that lies in the opportunities ahead for them. You know, Welcome.US is a new nonprofit initiative. We were stood up last September. It's our year anniversary last year. We were conceived of before the Afghan evacuation, but we operationalized soon afterwards, and we're basically founded on the belief that everyday Americans can be inspired and energized to welcome newcomers if they're invited to be part of it. And so really, instead of coming through kind of the political angle to think that, you know, immigrant you know, immigration policy is broken, which it is, right? We all know that that is true, but instead of coming at it from a political angle, how can we come to it from a service angle and recognize that we are a compassionate country, that we are a country made up of folks that really want to serve their local communities, and how do we open those doors so that everyday Americans can participate in welcoming, can be moved in the way that we've been moved, and can begin to change their perspective on what immigrants and immigration policy should look like.

     

    And so we— I do think this is a, you know, historic moment in which, you know, you've got folks— there's a great sponsor story that we have from, I forget the name of it, but it's some small town in South Carolina, and it's a story about somebody who saw it on the news and said, "What can I do?" and found out what they could do, and now they have a whole community rallying around an Afghan newcomer, and this is, this is a community that would not have interacted with this Afghan newcomer were there not these new programs. You know, oftentimes our newcomers come to large cities where it can be easy to be anonymous, but in small cities and rural communities across the United States, there's, you know, families, there's bridge clubs, there's churches figuring out how to welcome, and then they've got somebody in their community who they believe in, and they understand their story, and they can get committed to their journey.

     

     

    [00:18:49.12] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you. And it's, it's clear that these arrivals have provided opportunities for communities to come together and, and, um, and show their big hearts and their compassion. So thank you. So, uh, moving on to, to the next question. So given the, the challenges in the asylum processes— we heard about that today, backlogs, legal representation challenges, etc. The time it takes for refugee resettlement, and the arrivals of future large populations such as Ukrainians, Afghans. What, given these ongoing challenges, what might be the implications for our system of humanitarian protection? Start with Mr.—Director Bartlett.

     

     

    [00:19:37.15] - Lawrence Bartlett

    Start on the end and we'll go through. So what's interesting to me is that, I mean, everything that Kent—Kit had just said was, is like so true. I mean, we have to build, you know, a community, a community of communities, right? That believe and value others, no matter their status. So, you know, one of the things that I like about directing the refugee program is it's rather defined and, um, and I would have thought everybody would have loved it, but it turned out that wasn't true, um, in the kind of little recent past. But the refugee program, you know, the, the many things going for it, and one is that when people come here they actually have a pathway to permanent citizenship. And benefits to help them achieve that, right? And to become employed, to become self-sufficient, really to integrate into communities. And it comes with a whole bunch of security checks that, you know, people may love or not, but I think most of us in the program understand how those checks have really safeguarded the program from those people who would find fault in the people we're bringing here, including Afghans for that matter.

     

    So to me, that program is a great anchor, um, that, that we build on. And so again, you know, we will be building this year and perhaps next to get to 125,000 under this administration. We'll have to see, you know, obviously that's malleable in terms of new administrations, but trying to build that foundation, I think with what Kit talked about, trying to build community support so that people don't see this as a scary thing, but they see it as really a positive thing. Employers, um, you know, elected officials at the local level, frankly, for the most part, really love this program. But I think the other, you know, the other things that we've talked about, and thank you, Eskinder, for reminding me that I'm too young to remember some of these other past incidents. Um, also, I think we need to build kind of an understanding for how those programs really complement other things that we're doing. So I really see these, these things as really opportunities. And I know that there's a lot of discussion within this administration for figuring out how do we build on the successes that we've had over this past year.

     

    I mean, how do we build on the tremendous support from our veterans communities, you know, because it's not so hard to move from Afghans to the next population. And I think, you know, again, Kit has talked about some of the partners that we've developed and that we've funded, but also that they've self-funded to come out and be part of this, this response. And I think that's something that we have really doubled down on. And, you know, welcome.us and others are really helping us kind of galvanize some of that support. So I'm not sure if I really answered it, but I'll leave it at that.

     

     

    [00:22:42.20] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you. And Mr. Negash?

     

     

    [00:22:46.00] - Eskinder Negash

    Uh, again, I think, uh, we need to remind ourselves from time to time the refugee resettlement program in this country since 1980 If my information is correct, we have resettled 3.4 million refugees going back. I'm not even counting what happened 1975 to 1980. So we have resettled 3.4, 3.5 million. And refugee resettlement in this country is a public-private partnership. So every refugee resettlement we had and going back to Hungarian refugees who came in in 1956, is always a community engagement. I think what's new is from time to time we have to remind ourselves that we have the community support, but we have to engage them, as she mentioned. Keep in mind, you know, the refugee resettlement program in this country has been federally funded maybe in 1970. Prior to that, refugee resettlement in this country happen at the community level, not at the state level, at the federal level. So we have to get a little bit of historical perspective when we see in terms of what kind of refugee resettlement we will be doing in the future. Like anything else, after a while the system has to be revisited, you know, to see if it's really modern or effective.

     

    We have the Refugee Act, maybe reauthorized maybe once, but we have a long, long way of Looking at it and looking at in terms of the refugee resettlement, the current situation we have, you know, what happened in Ukraine, what happened in Afghanistan is different. I mean, our government reacted, reacted fast. But if you look at also refugee resettlement previously, most of the refugee resettlement we did is post-US government conflict, whether it's Vietnam, whether it's Laos, whether it's Somalia, was other countries, was Iraqi refugees. Now it's Afghan refugees. So there is a lot of work we have to do. As much as, you know, we did a great job in terms of welcoming Afghan, welcoming Ukrainian, we have a long way also to be inclusive of other asylum seekers. You know, as we welcomed thousands of Ukrainians, at the same time, you know, we were also not considering other refugees from Haiti and other places that they're coming to our country looking for asylum. So I think maybe going forward, As Kit mentioned, you know, when we start thinking community engagement, it has to be a very inclusive, you know, community engagement that we have to do, whether the refugees are coming from El Salvador or Guatemala, or they're coming from Afghanistan or DRC.

     

    So there is a lot of work we have to do, but I think we need to remind, you know, that we have done this refugee resettlement that is a modern refugee resettlement since the 1980 Refugee Act, that we have resettled millions of people, and there are millions of derivative beneficiaries who came to this country. So as we go forward, you know, using this model that, you know, the reaction of the community when the Bosnian came to this country, there's a lot of, you know, support and the media play major roles. But when the Congolese come, they're not going to get the same kind of reaction. So we have to take that into consideration, how we will be a welcoming community to all, not necessarily that, you know, what the media present to us, the crisis. So sometimes I struggle as a refugee resettlement person, and I have resettled refugees. I came as myself as refugees. Sometimes we have to balance this selective humanity, which is a challenge for us because, you know, there are about 100 million refugees and IDPs in the world. Who we choose and who comes to the U.S. is a very small fraction.

     

    So how can we have this very inclusive policy of that taking all issues into consideration as part of our resettlement model? And then how do we prepare when we have refugees coming to this country, not necessarily from post-U.S. conflict, like Afghanistan, 20 years, on Ukraine, what happened with Russia. That's something that we have to work with the larger community because refugees are not just what CNN and NBC is telling us who refugees are and why we should be giving priorities to some of them. So I think the challenge for us now, not necessarily for the government in terms of policy, is We, the resettlement agency, I represent over 40 resettlement agencies around the country. The average of these resettlement agencies are 90 years. And my organization had been doing refugee resettlement, doing advocacy work for 111 years. And the first time my agency got any funding to provide refugee resettlement was in 1978. So you can see that we have done this with the community support, with the churches, with synagogues, mosques. You know, the resettlement has always involved the community, but whether we are going to do it in an organized way with the help of Kit and the new organization, I think we can make it better.

     

    But again, you know, we have to always take, you know, the journey of these programs and where we are now and where we came from.

     

     

     

    [00:28:32.11] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you, Mr. Negash. And Ms. Taintor, do you have any thoughts you would like to share about implications for our system of humanitarian protection moving forward given the events of this past year?

     

     

     

    [00:28:43.21] - Kit Taintor

    Yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know, we don't have a lot of tools in our toolbox to welcome newcomers, and I think, um, the one thing that we, we've definitely learned is we have more tools than we thought, and we can be more creative with those tools. And so again, it's not, um, it's not an either-or situation, like either with the resettlement, um, sort of approach or humanitarian parole, but it it is really both. And so I think that is, that is what I think, you know, kind of moving forward is that, you know, we've uncovered some new ways of doing business and hopefully these new ways of business will just help us welcome more newcomers because as Eskinder said, there are many more newcomers in need of safety than we welcome each and every year. And so how do we put it all on the table and make it happen and recognize the strengths of the different programs, the challenges of the different programs, and try to stitch something together, which is workable even if it's not perfect, right? I don't think anybody, anybody would say that, you know, humanitarian parole as a tool is, is perfect, but there is a time and a place for it.

     

    And we've sort of shown that we're able to utilize it for the betterment of the American community, our diaspora community, our veteran communities, and communities that really care about, you know, forcibly displaced people internationally.

     

     

    [00:29:53.00] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you. And then just following up on the humanitarian parole And in thinking about how thousands arrived this year and were paroled in, how will our refugee policy and integration be affected by the growing use of parole? It clearly was needed to respond immediately to immediate needs, and— but how is that going to affect our refugee— our policy and integration using parole? And then I would ask about temporary protected status. Now, temporary protected status is something that you can only receive when you're in the United States. But if we have flows in emergency like the thousands of people we have at the border that are fleeing conditions that are encompassed in the description, uh, the, the criteria in the statute, is that something we should be, be looking for expanding or pushing? So I'll start.

     

     

    [00:30:42.14] - Lawrence Bartlett

    So we'll start at the end again. So what I would say under this administration is, you know, the use of parole is not going to affect the refugee program because This administration is extremely committed to trying to achieve the really ambitious targets that they've set out for us. So this 125,000, um, which again will be our target this coming fiscal year, um, we will be doing everything we can to get as high as possible within that. So it is not limiting us in any way. You know, the funds that we are utilizing for the Refugee Resettlement Program that we are providing to our partners, into communities, and frankly, the money that we spend overseas to help process refugees, that is walled off, if you will, from the other types of response mechanisms that have been used this last year. So I think that is not in effect, and again, I would submit that I think, again, having that as a foundational program probably in a way proves confidence in some of these other measures to show that that in fact we have a foundational program for, for frankly, for populations that can wait a little bit longer for protection.

     

    And then for those extreme circumstances where we have true emergencies and need to move people, then I think that's when the creativity and some of the new tools that we've used this last year really can play, play a role. And then frankly, you know, we, we need legislation to help people adjust status once they've arrived. People can go through the asylum system. People know it's long and slow. Perhaps it's improving, but, but again, trying to create a more permanent status for people once they've arrived is, is the one thing that it's not accomplished through parole, and we know that. But again, I think we have to continue to examine what the possibilities are.

     

     

    [00:32:35.06] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you. Miss Taintor.

     

     

    [00:32:38.17] - Kit Taintor

    Um, yeah, I mean, I think, um, you know, I was listening this morning to the Clinton Global Initiative and they were talking about, um, this this morning, and the Queen of Jordan was saying, you know, we need to look through the windshield, not through a rearview mirror. And, you know, that's true. You know, we're going to continue to have more forcibly displaced folks, whether that's because of war, whether that's because of climate migration. And so again, how do we put all those tools on the table, understand when they're imperfect, and try to correct them where they are? Um, I mean, you guys know more than most of the American public that our immigration system is made up of a patchwork. Um, there are temporary protected status, you know, there are different— there's asylum, there's all these little things that we throw into it, and we hope that it mixes together in a way that creates permanency and safety and opportunity for newcomers. And so, you know, it's not— it's gonna, you know, it's not an either-or, it's an and-in-both. And how do we— how do we recognize that, you know, where— what is the role that TPS can play in some of the things that we are talking about?

     

    What are the pros and cons of that? What are the things that we can throw on the table right now? What are the things that we can begin to create a future for, for the long term? And, you know, again, I mean, I'm just saying, you know, that, you know, it— it's really an exciting time time to be part of this work because we are planning for the future. We are innovating. We are trying out new things. We are trying to mix it up, for the lack of a better word, and try to really move forward with a better way to welcome all newcomers, whether they're coming across our southern border, whether they are coming from Ukraine, whether they're coming from Afghanistan. What are the ways in which we can really, you know, capitalize on all the welcoming that we've seen over the past year and really create, you know, an America that works for all and an America that is prepared for the future, which is just there's just, you know, honestly going to be more and more displacement and more and more pressure on our southern border and on our borders in general to create, you know, opportunity for those that need it.

     

     

    [00:34:20.12] - Eskinder Negash

    Thank you. Just to add what Larry said, I think, you know, if we decided to bring people into this country as parolees, we need also to think in terms of adjusting their status. So that's why my organization and a number of organizations have been advocating to see if there's going to be an Afghan Adjustment Act. And we have been working on that because otherwise, you know, the 80,000 Afghans who came to this country, they have to adjust their status. Basically, we are saying you should apply for asylum even though we, for whatever reason, we brought you here. But now you have to go through immigration process and adjust your status. The same thing with Ukraine. Again, you know, I don't have any objection, you know, bringing people with parole and We have immigration system for H visa, students, I mean, all kinds of things that people come to this country. But at the same time, if you made this humanitarian gesture to bring in 80,000 and probably 100,000 Ukrainians, we need also to think in terms of how quickly we can adjust their status so they can actually live their life without some interruption or waiting asylum decision.

     

    So I think that's, that's part of the challenge. I mean, we are trying our best to represent them because I think, as some of you know, applying for asylum in this country is not an easy thing. I mean, it's a very complicated thing. You know, you have to go through a process. It takes time. The good thing is, you know, they have employment authorization already so they can work, but it is really not very, very easy. Just in terms of TPS, As you know, TPS has been around since 1990, and then we have actually countries under TPS for a long period of time, like El Salvador, you know, a number of countries. If I'm not mistaken, as of January 2022, we have close to 500,000 TPS granted, including I think the 146 pending for 2 countries. So TPS, if it is going to be temporary, And then if temporary means 20 years, then I don't know what temporary is going to look like. So I think, you know, we need to take into consideration some of these TPS countries or to some extent have a well-founded fear of persecution. That's why we decided to keep them here.

     

    But at the same time, we need to really either create a path for them to adjust their status rather than every 18 months they have to go through the process or speed of the Homeland Security. So I, again, you know, that's also a little bit of challenge. So my approach is, you know, that we need to be very inclusive. You know, we need to have a policy that's fair for everybody, not a very selective places that we pick people and decide and expedite the process. And somebody from El Salvador, from Honduras, been waiting for 20 years, still have to get another 18 months adjustment. So that's really some of the challenge we have. Now hopefully when we discuss refugees and other issues, we'll be very inclusive again. You know, their plight is the same as plight of other people who come into this country.

     

     

    [00:37:34.21] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you, thank you, Mr. Negash. And just one final question before we'll open up our questions to the audience. For the audience. Given the huge numbers that have arrived this year and our effective response to those, and looking at the border and the huge numbers of people along the border, millions that have come to the United States, many of whom have asylum claims, what role can or should refugee resettlement or refugee reception play in serving those at our border?

     

     

    [00:38:11.09] - Lawrence Bartlett

    Wow, I don't think I want to answer that question. I'm a government, I'm a government official, and so I have to be very careful here, and it's really not my writ, the southern border. Um, I mean, what's— I think I'm going to pivot over to, to kind of Kit's brief, which is about reception and community inclusion and all of the various partnerships that have I mean, as a skinhead would say, they're not brand new. It's not like they have never been used before. I think this year we've seen again, mostly because I think of the veterans community in the US. I think I give them the most credit for being front and center and forward leaning. That has then, I think, really had a ripple-on effect. So I think, you know, to me, from kind of a non-governmental side, I would say that's, I think, you know, frankly, people this last year thought our agencies were overwhelmed. I mean, Skinner told me time and time, don't worry, you can send me more. But for the most part, we knew the agencies were right. They, they were flat out, especially given the speed and the scale of the Afghan resettlement that we had to do once people got here.

     

    They were at military bases, but getting them off the base became the next priority. And we were going flat out and By the way, affordable housing is pretty hard to find, not just in Washington, D.C., by the way, but all of this country. But I think all of that, you know, what we learned was there's a lot more capacity here than we knew. And except for housing, granted, that we can't make, but all the rest of it, jobs, you know, support, you know, Giving people the nurturing that, you know, Kit talked about in South Carolina, that we've got that in spades. And so I think to me, and it's kind of a non-governmental response, but I think that's where we have kind of a comparative advantage, if you will, to a lot of countries, I think, because I've been around the world looking at other resettlement countries and a lot of it is run by governments. I mean, really run by government, not just funded, but run. And it's like, no, we're run by communities., and we help them. But, you know, and even a Eskinder doesn't run resettlement because it's his communities. I'm sorry to say that, that really anchor the refugees, and it's the refugees themselves, right?

     

    Because they're really good at trying to figure out what they need. So I think anyway, it's kind of a long-winded way of saying it, but I think that's where, that's where we have resilience, and that's, I think, where we have capacity.

     

     

    [00:40:43.24] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you.

     

     

    [00:40:45.00] - Kit Taintor

    I mean, I always think about, you know, if you're in a local community and you see a newcomer in a grocery store, you, you don't ask like, how did you come here? Did you come as a are you a refugee? You know, like, what is your immigration status? Like, those are questions that you don't ask, like, friends and families and neighbors. And so at the local community, they're just people, they're just individuals, they're just students, they're just workers, they're just neighbors, like, members of your community. And so, like Larry is saying, like, a lot of the fabric of welcoming exists no matter the immigration status that is being welcomed. And so how do we celebrate it? How do we build it out? How do we shine the spotlight on it to ensure people like Larry and other folks in the government, you know, understand that we have more capacity to welcome than we thought before. You know, a lot of times, sorry, Larry, a lot of times, you know, when we think about capacity, we're thinking about the capacity of, you know, certain, certain, you know, segments or certain places, and we're not thinking about the capacity of America as a whole.

     

    And if you really ask the question, like, how, you know, how much can America welcome, I think we would welcome a lot more if we were thinking about welcoming as being a whole of society or even a whole of government response and not necessarily just underneath sort of a program at the Department of State or, you know, 9 refugee resettlement agencies, which do great work, I'm not saying that they don't, but you know, just how we build that out and how we make it part of the fabric of our country, I think we would find that we're able to welcome people no matter their immigration status using a lot of the same tools and resources that we know end up in benefit not only for the newcomer but for the communities that welcome them.

     

     

    [00:42:16.16] - Eskinder Negash

    So, Kit, I think the best way, you know, when you go next time to grocery store, the question is How did your ancestors came here? That will have a much better conversation if you go about 100 years, because we all assume that everybody just coming in now and was forgetting that people have been coming to this country for the past 400 years. It's just a question of who's coming when. I think in terms of the border, again, everybody knows that Title 42 is a big issue. To. The idea of people not getting asylum is— or requesting asylum, you know, once they get here. I think that's something I think we should do as a country. I mean, look, you know, we have to learn also from other countries. There is a crisis in Ukraine. Russia invaded the country. You know, millions of people decided to go to Europe, and Europe said, okay, come in. You know, we know what's going on. And I think there is a lesson out of that. You know, when you You have El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras have a lot of crisis with gangs and everything else, and these people are fleeing gangs.

     

    And when you have 60,000 gang members in El Salvador alone, and we need to think a little bit differently. They may not have the government, may not be the one forcing them to leave, but the government is not in a position to protect them. So they're no plane. So I think it's in our best interest, you know, to be a little bit welcoming of those people who are coming through the border from Mexico or other places. And the other thing is, you know, look, we have actually in FY '22 and maybe '23, we'll have more Cubans coming into this country, mostly through Mexico. And that number is not 20,000, not 30,000, maybe 100,000 or more. But we don't actually offer the same kind of welcoming because of the law we have. The Haitians will be going back, but the Cubans will be admitting them. Why are we doing that? So again, this is part of the challenge we have in terms of who comes to this country and what process do they come, which one is welcome, which one is not, is part of a larger conversation we have in this country. It's part of the immigration discussion, even part of the refugee discussion.

     

    I go to El Salvador all the time. We have 3 locations we're providing service. I mean, I'm telling you that when I went to a small town called Usulután, the police actually have to wear big masks because they are afraid. The police, you know. So imagine these children who are coming in from Central America unaccompanied. That number is sometimes 60,000 80,000, they have to go an immigration process here. So the idea that you can only be refugees if you are coming from Europe, from Africa, from Asia, is just not a very good way of really responding to humanitarian concern. That's the way I see it. So we need to think in terms of how we deal with people coming in from the border, through the border. We had about about 1,500 Ukrainians who came into Tijuana, Mexico. Yeah, and we let them in, you know. Yeah, and then we have, you know, 20,000 Haitians and others stuck there in Tijuana. There's no way— I mean, they see San Diego, but they're still waiting for the process to help them. So it's a little bit of a challenge, but I think there's a There is a lot of history.

     

    There is a lot of experience. The system and American people have been very, very generous. I believe, Larry, correct me, in 1989, I think we resettled 200,000 refugees under the first Bush. Yeah, 207,000. So the American people are always willing to help us resettle refugees or welcoming refugees. But I think as Kit said, you know, we have to engage them. You know, they should know, they should have understanding who's coming because there is schools or there is healthcare system that people will need. But overall, historically looking at, we have a very, very generous welcoming refugee communities in this country. And I'm one of them who received that benefit when I came to this country over 40 years ago. So I know firsthand that American people are welcome. In fact, I was resettled in Stone Mountain, Georgia 40 years ago. So if you don't know that. So you're welcome here.

     

     

     

    [00:47:11.20] - Anna Gallagher

    Thank you so much. That was a rich response. So now folks, we're going to open up for questions. So please come to the mics with your questions.

     

     

    [[FOR THE Q&A PORTION OF THE TRANSCRIPT, SPEAKERS ARE NOT IDENTIFIED BY NAME. PLEASE SEE THE RECORDING TO IDENTIFY SPEAKERS.]]

     

     

    [00:47:28.16] - Speaker 5

    Hello. There we go. Can you hear me now? So this last part of the discussion I think is really important, relevant, and since part of this conference is about policy, I want to just to bring this up. I mean, our asylum and refugee processes are kind of two sides of the same coin, and yet, as you correctly point out, to many Americans, they see them completely differently. Um, and a lot of it, my understanding, I think, in looking at polling and listening to focus groups, is one is organized and, and done by the government in an orderly way, and the other is people arriving on their own in a disorderly way, and that, that affects how they, how they receive, how they receive people, how they, how they see them, even if they're coming, as you said, Mr. Negash, from very similar situations. So one thing I wonder is that at least in the last decade or more, our refugee resettlement program for the Americas has been relatively small compared to lots of other places in the world, and yet that is where the majority mostly still the majority of asylum seekers are coming from, looking to the next, uh, you know, allotment, 125,000, so we hear.

     

     

    [00:48:53.15] - Speaker 5

    Um, we know in the LA Declaration there was some working, how can we work with other countries in the hemisphere to maybe expand availability, to look at refugee resettlement more broadly. Mr. Bartlett, what can you tell us about those efforts?

     

     

    [00:49:08.24] - Speaker 2

    I'm glad you pivoted from asylum to actually going back to refugee processing so I can actually try to answer part of that. So, um, so what's interesting is I, I don't know, I've worked for at least 4 administrations, maybe 5. Every single one of them cares deeply about the southwest border. Surprise, surprise, right? And what can we do to First of all, create conditions so that people don't need to come here. Okay, that is a long-term solution. And what can we do kind of proactively to bring people affirmatively from their country so that they don't have to make the dangerous journey? It is a well-worn phrase. And that we can actually provide benefits and the kind of the regularity that refugee processing provides. So this administration, like the last, I will tell you, has been very interested to see what we can do on the State Department side, and of course we do in concert with DHS, to process more refugees from the region. That said, it is, um, it, it, it has complexities that we have nowhere else in the world. And the reason is because we're trying to identify, I mean, especially when you're looking at Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, we're looking at people who are still in their country of nationality.

     

     

    [00:50:39.05] - Speaker 2

    And so in a typical refugee identification process, people will cross an international border, UNHCR will be involved, they will do registration, maybe they'll do some assistance, and then either immediately or usually over time, people be identified for vulnerability reasons and then resettled or referred for resettlement. As Eskinder said, it's less than 1% of the world's refugees are ever resettled, right? But believe me, if we could identify, we would resettle 100% of the refugees in the three Northern Triangle countries if we could identify who they are. But trying to figure out who's a refugee while they're still in their country is really complicated. So we've been working for a number of years with UNHCR and kind of a host of local NGOs to refer people who have refugee characteristics and vulnerabilities to our program. It is both slow but also small, and it's frustrating for, I think, everybody involved. So I don't— there's not— I mean, we have given additional funding to both UNHCR, and now we're going to actually be providing some money to some U.S.-based NGOs to do some additional identification of possible refugee cases. I will tell you, not all of them have great claims, so that a number wash out as well in the process.

     

     

    [00:52:02.07] - Speaker 2

    The other thing that we're doing, and this is part of the calculus I think around the LA delegation, uh, declaration, is to look at other populations in the region. So we know, for example, Nicaraguans, they are a more classic refugee population where they actually have fled and they're in other countries. And so we are going to be— well, we've started already, but we will be scaling up a program for Nicaraguans. And then we've worked hard with UNHCR over the last year to create a real program for Venezuelans. You know, the For those people who know that situation, the hosting, kind of like Eskinder talked about with Ukrainians in Europe, a lot of countries do a really great job in terms of, you know, in the region hosting Venezuelans. But we've determined, and I think, you know, we were pushing hard for this, that it's now time to really look hard at resettlement. And so we're providing additional funding to UNHCR for both Venezuelans and Nicaraguans. So you will see the numbers from from the region expand, but I don't think we've really cracked the code yet as to how to do volume out of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

     

     

    [00:53:12.14] - Speaker 2

    And I'm not sure we will, but believe me, we continue to look at that.

     

     

    [00:53:17.05] - Speaker 1

    And then before I take my next question from the audience, but please come up to the mic, I'm going to take a question from our virtual folks. And this is specifically for you, Kit. How many U.S. homes took in Ukrainians and Afghans? A question for Kit.

     

     

    [00:53:36.20] - Speaker 4

    That's a great question and you can see me trying to do arithmetic in my head and I'm going, uh, not going to get there, but I think, you know, about 55,000 Ukrainians have arrived. So, you know, how that translates into the numbers of families that have taken Ukrainians in, I can't do great math, but I would divide that by 4 and sort of assume that that that's probably true. Larry, I don't know if you know the numbers for the private sponsorship for off the top of your head.

     

     

    [00:54:02.22] - Speaker 2

    The, yeah, what I would say on the Afghan side is—

     

     

    [00:54:07.20] - Speaker 4

    You see us all trying to do math.

     

     

    [00:54:09.06] - Speaker 2

    It's fairly, no, it's fairly small because, you know, we did start up a program called sponsor circles, and I want to say it's 300 families maybe that were supported through sponsor circles. It's something that we're trying to pivot off of to really create a private sponsorship program. But again, it'll be rather nascent this year in terms of numbers. But again, I think it's an important concept.

     

     

    [00:54:33.10] - Speaker 4

    Yeah, and I think, you know, while it's really important to think about the number of households that have taken newcomers in, always think about like what is the constellation of support that's around those households. And so, you know, there was a Ukrainian family that was sponsored by a family in Wyoming, and, you know, Wyoming hasn't had a refugee resettlement program ever. And so just the idea that you would have, you know, a family that, you know, has neighbors, that has a church community, that has friends, that has other family members that live in those local communities, like how does that radiate out from that particular household? How does that radiate out in social media that shares a different story about a newcomer that I think is really key, especially in communities that might be politically disinclined to support immigrants, and then how does that sort of radiate out in that community itself? And so that's what I always think about is like how do you create those ripple effects that really change our hearts and minds over the long term, How does that in effect help us change policy? Because you can't change policy unless the people will it.

     

     

    [00:55:26.22] - Speaker 4

    And so how do we get to the people to will it?

     

     

    [00:55:28.22] - Speaker 1

    Perfect, thank you. And our next question, oh, it's from the virtual world. Oh no, it's your turn, I'm sorry.

     

     

    [00:55:38.24] - Speaker 6

    My name is Andrea Lardia and I work in a high school here in Prince William County. One of the cases that we have usually is with the families after they're arriving and they're trying to enroll in the school. And then we find out there's different situations going on One of them are the students that come from Afghanistan without their parents, unaccompanied, and then they're released to a sponsor who supposedly is a relative. After that happen, many, many cases, the sponsor leaves the students in another house by themselves. We don't know about it, and we find out later that it's a student for 3 months that never attended school, they never had been enrolled, and they don't have even basic documentation. We had cases where kids, 2 or 3-year students, they didn't have a way to provide for themselves, no medical, nothing. Finally, Catholic Charities was able to help us to enroll them in the program, you know, and get all the paperwork, but it took 6 months, 7 months. So my first question is, what type of follow-up the Refugee Resettlement Office does for that kind of cases? That's my first question. My second question is regarding the students.

     

     

    [00:56:49.24] - Speaker 6

    They come to the country without parents from the south of the border, from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala. They come fleeing poverty, abuse, many cases sexual abuse. They come to the border, they go to the Office of Resettlement, Refugee and Resettlement. They're released to a sponsor who's supposed to be a relative, and the relative later say, oh, I cannot deal with this anymore, I wash my hands, and they leave the kid. Gets by themselves or with someone else. They go from house to house. In the meantime, these students don't have any type of documentation. They maybe are eligible to apply for a juvenile visa, a special visa, but of course, they may be 16, 17, almost 18, or by the time that they can apply, they are already 18. They cannot do it because the juvenile court, oh, they don't know what they have to do. I have asked them many times. What paper they gave you? It's just a piece of paper that says, "We release it to a sponsor." That's it. That's the only thing they have. They don't know what to do. They don't know where to go. These students don't have medical attention.

     

     

    [00:57:59.02] - Speaker 6

    We have to find ways to get them the attention they need, but they don't have a guardian. They don't have nobody to sign for them. Is there any way for these students that can be qualified— I don't know, maybe in the future, something that the refugee program can think. They put them as a type of refugee. They— it's not their fault what they're going through. Why they need to have it more harder? You have to see their faces. It is heartbreaking. Thank you.

     

     

    [00:58:26.05] - Speaker 2

    So I want to start with a little bit of that, but then it's really brilliant that Eskinder used to be the director of ORR, so he's going to be on the hook for some of this, I can tell you.

     

     

    [00:58:37.12] - Speaker 3

    To be.

     

     

    [00:58:38.03] - Speaker 2

    You know, what's interesting, what's interesting, you know, there's a whole bunch of threads in that, and, um, and they're really important. And, and one of them is, you know, there's this, um, again, for people who are students of the refugee program, you'll know this ongoing debate about the kind of professionalization of refugee resettlement. And, you know, love it or hate it, and, you know, it's been federalized, and, you know, we fund agencies like USCRI and you know, we've gotten away from communities and, you know, the people that Kit works with. I mean, it's a whole smorgasbord of stuff, right? And none of them are the best, right? They all work well. They work best when they work together. So, you know, as we're looking at, you know, we did community sponsor circles and now we're going to be a community sponsorship, private sponsorship pilot. You know, one of the concerns that we have, of course, is what happens if sponsors don't follow through because we can't let people slip. We can't just say, you know, wash our hands. And I heard this in the example, give people a piece of paper and say, good luck.

     

     

    [00:59:45.05] - Speaker 2

    Right? And so it's one of the reasons that we're taking a little bit of time trying to put together a private sponsorship program, which frankly will be only partial anyway, because we still want people to receive federal benefits. So we're still trying to work out how all of that will work, but we do need accountability. And so we're not— and frankly, we don't have enough staffing, frankly, or infrastructure in the government. So we're going to have to contract some of that out, but then we'll hold our contractors accountable to make sure other people are accountable. So that to me is always going to be imperative, you know, as we build out additional— I mean, a number of our agencies have have brilliant relationships, you know, not just with faith-based organizations but other groups who for, you know, decades helped refugees. But there still has to be accountability, and that's why at this point in time it's still our federally funded partners that we make accountable. They can use as many other sponsors as they want, but at the end of the day, when something goes badly, they need to be there to pick up the pieces and make it right.

     

     

    [01:00:50.04] - Speaker 2

    So I don't know on the other side, asylum. Eskinder, I'm sure you have some thoughts.

     

     

    [01:00:54.22] - Speaker 3

    So I think even the refugee program, when you have unaccompanied minors, we have actually a program since 1978, it was called URM, unaccompanied refugee minors. So if they are actually admitted as parolee, they are entitled to the same extent as refugees. So we do have, I'm not sure about that case, but we do have a system where this Children will be in private home like a foster care system. Depending on the state, they will be emancipated. In some places it's 21. In fact, post-emancipation there is also services. So for the refugee program, if they came in as without, without a parent, unaccompanied, we have actually a very good system around the country, some of them as private foster care system. HHS fund them fully. So that's the way the system— but once in a while you may have some kids fall through the cracks. But they have that system. And in the unaccompanied minors, once you are released from custody or once you're released to a family member, there is actually a wide expanded program, what we call it is post-release services. So the kids are released, there is a follow-up case management services. There's a lot of home visits that they do.

     

     

    [01:02:21.04] - Speaker 3

    And as you know, in this country, for elementary and high school under Title I, there is no immigration status in terms of going to school. But the question is, somebody has to take them, somebody do the vaccine and all kind of follow-up. So even with all the challenges we have with sometimes, you know, we get up to 130,000 unaccompanied minors per year, there is a system, at least the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to do post-release services, which is every client will be going, they will be checking the condition. If the system is not working, I mean, if the sponsor is not providing providing the basic services, you know, the HHS has a right to take them and put them in different situations. So it's not a perfect system, but the system is there in terms of follow-up service for unaccompanied minors, mostly coming from El Salvador, Guatemala, and El Salvador. For the refugee program, if they are coming without a family member, there is a program called URM. It's actually In a lot of states, it's like a foster care system but is fully funded. And depending on the state's requirement, whether they'll be emancipated at 21, in some places maybe 18, but most of them are to get a lot of services.

     

     

    [01:03:43.02] - Speaker 3

    They go to school, they get the same kind of benefit like any other refugees who's admitted to the US, even more. Thank you.

     

     

    [01:03:52.06] - Speaker 1

    Thank you. Just one quick question from our virtual audience, and then we'll take yours. Uh, will refugees from climate disruptions be prioritized for resettlement?

     

     

    [01:04:02.24] - Speaker 2

    And I, I love these questions. Um, so it's interesting, I was at a conference in Geneva this summer, and this was one of the topics that people were talking about. And, you know, there's a lot of words around this, you know, are they climate refugees, are they refugees affected by climate change, change. I think we would probably espouse the latter, and the discussions that we're having within the administration and with UNHCR is to look at that as, I think, another indicator of resettlement need. And so again, just as people have— I mean, it's a legitimate protection need if the climate situation in your country of first asylum is affecting you. So it will be put, I think in the basket of priorities, but, you know, like a lot of other things, it will have to be measured against the other ones that we have.

     

     

    [01:04:52.24] - Speaker 1

    Okay, thank you.

     

     

    [01:04:54.08] - Speaker 1

    And we'll take one more question from our audience here, and then we're going to have to wrap up. But please feel free after to come up and speak with the panelists if they have time.

     

     

    [01:05:05.06] - Speaker 7

    I just came back from Ukraine, and all the local stakeholders, local politicians, local NGOs are expecting a humanitarian disaster during the winter. In light of that, are there any predictions of how many people are going to come next year? Well, I'll start and then Kit will correct me. There's a couple different things that are going on, at least in terms of the refugee program for Ukrainians, because again, the administration, I think, for especially for speed and efficiency pivoted towards parole, right? But we still maintain a refugee resettlement program for Ukrainians, and that's coming through the Lautenberg program. So religious minorities who have family members in the US, and we've on the State Department side, the center that actually operates that for us, which is run by IOM, used to be in Kyiv, obviously is not right now, but we have offices, satellite offices now in Moldova as well as Poland. And so we are processing kind of as quickly as possible Ukrainians who are in our system, so they will be coming, which actually, I don't know, I think it's the fourth largest population we have so far this year. We'll continue to accelerate, I think, those cases.

     

     

    [01:06:28.23] - Speaker 2

    Sorry, there's there are 2, 4, 6, 6 largest. We'll continue to accelerate those cases, but so far we have not seen Ukrainians in need of U.S. resettlement coming through any of the mechanisms that we've been able to identify. So either working with UNHCR, working with European partners, Ukrainians up to now have really wanted to shelter in place, partly because a lot of the men are still back in Ukraine,, and really want to stay as close as possible to the border. So again, we're ready and I think we're prepared to provide a larger response in terms of actual resettlement, but we so far have not seen the, the need.

     

     

    [01:07:11.05] - Speaker 4

    Yeah, I think it's, you know, important to recognize that, you know, Larry's talking about sort of the formal refugee resettlement program, and then you have Uniting for Ukraine, which is the humanitarian parole program. And so, you know, I think, um, your point is well taken and well understood, um, that the, the situation continues continues to grow and get more complex the longer that it goes along. And so how does winter begin to affect those movements? How does, you know, the cessation of supportive services in Poland begin to affect somebody's desire to come to the United States even if their family is still in Ukraine? Really trying to keep our finger on the pulse of that. You know, President Biden said, you know, that the goal was 100,000 Ukrainians, about 50% to that goal, but that's not a ceiling, that's not a maximum. You know, we're hopeful that that a lot of the successes of the program can continue over the next, you know, 6 months, you know, 12 months, 18 months, however long it takes for, for the situation in Ukraine to not only like stabilize but be a place that you could go home to as a family.

     

     

    [01:08:10.06] - Speaker 4

    And so one of the things that we are tracking along with our partners at the Department of Homeland Security is that the situation has changed, you know, where maybe, maybe 6 months ago you thought, yeah, I can go to the United States, it's temporary, I'll be able to come home in 6 months. Now it's not, and now families are really looking at where do I need to rebuild my life? Is it in Poland, really close to where Ukraine is, so I can, you know, see my husband from time to time? Or am I really ready to start over whole and come to the United States and really hope that that temporary status changes into a permanent status so that I can build a life here with my kids? And so it's just such a dynamic situation. And again, like, we are so fortunate to have the vehicle of Uniting for Ukraine to complement the refugee resettlement program, to know that it is imperfect, but know that it also, at the end of the day, offers people safety, sanctuary, health insurance, you know, work authorization, all those things that people really need to start their lives here.

     

     

    [01:09:00.22] - Speaker 4

    So thanks for the question. It's such a good one.

     

     

    [01:09:03.13] - Speaker 3

    Just to add, I agree with everything they said in terms of Ukrainian, but I just wanted to say this. So when you do the advocacy work, also you take into consideration we have still refugees. We have refugees since 1968 in refugee camp. We have refugees in Dadaab since 1991. We have refugees since 1975. 75. We have actually Rohingya refugees also. So I think, you know, I, you know, look, you know, we have to do everything that we can to support the Ukrainian and Afghan, but we have this protracted refugee situation also around the globe. You know, 1968 refugee camp still waiting. Hopefully somebody will consider them, you know. So keep in mind, you know, in this discussion, again, you know, we are reacting to the current events, you know, the headlines, but there are also other refugees. I mean, the Rohingyas are going through a very difficult situation, not necessarily snow, but flooding has been affecting them. You have Eritrean refugees in Sudan since 1968, maybe not snow, but it's 115-degree heat they have been living there. So when we talk about refugees, and I I think try to be very, very inclusive and take into consideration we do have other refugees also globally who need our protection.

     

     

    [01:10:28.07] - Speaker 1

    Thank you. And with that, we are— we've reached the end of our panel. I want to thank you all, the audience virtually and in person, for attending our 19th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference. One of our objectives today was to get folks thinking and talking Today's speakers inspired us to look at different perspectives, to start small if necessary, to start where we can and look for ways to dialog and work together. I think they hit it out of the park, folks. I think they did a great job. So in ending, I do want to make sure to thank MPI, who were the leaders this year in organizing and presenting the conference, all the staff of MPI, also Georgetown Law School, of course, and clinic staff as well for the work done to make this important conference happen. So thank you so much, folks, for your attention and your heart.

     

     

    [01:11:17.05] - Speaker 1

    Thank you.

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