Illegal immigrants are suing U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other officials, complaining that three judges in North Carolina are unlawfully denying bond hearings to prolong their detention.
Two nonprofit groups and immigration attorney Jordan Forsythe Greer allege that two of the judges are using a rubber stamp to reject bond hearing requests, reported The Charlotte Observer. They say the stamp says: “The Court declines to exercise its authority.” The immigration courts in Charlotte, like other parts of the country, have a huge caseload.
The Observer reported that one of the judges, Stuart Couch, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, said last year that the immigration court in Charlotte has a backlog of 8,000 asylum cases and handles more than 4,000 deportations a year.
Court records show that the defendants in the case include U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, DOJ acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review James McHenry, Chief Immigration Judge MaryBeth Keller, Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Deepali Nadkarni, Immigration Judge V. Stuart Couth, Immigration Judge Barry J. Pettinato, Immigration Judge Theresa Holmes-Simmons, ICE Atlanta Field Office Director Sean W. Gallagher, Mecklenburg County Jail Major T.E. White, and Steward Detention Center Warden Charlie Peterson.
The plaintiffs state:
The government cannot lock people up without giving them access to prompt bond hearings and an opportunity to show that they should be released for the months or years that it takes to adjudicate their removal cases. This lawsuit challenges the actions of immigration judges in Charlotte, North Carolina who have done just that: refused to conduct bond hearings for people who properly file bond motions with the Charlotte Immigration Court.
The judges were reportedly not holding bond hearings because most of the illegal immigrants in the Carolinas are transferred to other jurisdictions. Greer told the Observer that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) interferes with the legal process by moving detainees elsewhere or telling the court that their transfer is imminent.
Now, a Mexican national, Jorge Miguel Palacious, and Jesus Eduardo Cardenas Lozoya are suing. Palacious was taken into custody on Tuesday. Lozoya was detained on January 3 and is reported to be in Lumpkin, Georgia, in the Stewart Detention Center.
A lawyer with the American Immigration Council, one of the nonprofits in the case, told the Observer: “Charlotte immigration judges are outliers.” She charged that the judges were “shirk[ing] their responsibilities.” The American Immigration Council says their nonprofit “seeks to shape a twenty-first-century vision of the American immigrant experience.” The Council says it does so through “research and policy analysis, litigation and communications and international exchange.”
Breitbart Texas reported last March that there were more than 540,000 immigration cases pending in the United States. Attorney General Sessions said in April that all adults illegally crossing the border will be detained and the Obama Administration’s policy of “Catch and Release” was over. He also said that additional immigration judges were to be appointed and sent to the border on an expedited basis, Breitbart News reported.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, Gab, and Facebook.
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