Washington understands

Never again can we say that Washington doesn’t understand. They “get it”. They have their fingers on the pulse of America.

On November 15th the Director of the Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review issued a news release regarding the immigration courts. It seems that former Attorney General Alberto “I owe my success to La Raza” Gonzalez felt that too many illegal aliens were showing up in immigration court without legal representation. So Gonzalez “mandated an expansion of pro bono efforts” to allow more free legal help for these folks.

So The Department of Justice went to work on the problem. Here’s the upshot from the memo: “In the past year, EOIR has doubled the size of the Legal Orientation Program for unrepresented detained aliens, expanded pro bono programs for unaccompanied alien children, and increased the number of court-sponsored pro bono attorney training programs.”

It sounds to me like “pro bono” is costing you and me some tax dollars.

The appeals process works like this. An illegal alien is caught in the United States. The search for loopholes begins. Lawyers, judges, Centro de Informacion y Progreso (a United Way agency), and other do-gooders look for some reason to allow this person to stay. No Draconian measures here.

A favorite ploy is to seek asylum, claiming that going home would create danger for the person either due to politics or religion. It doesn’t work very often but it does buy the illegal alien more time in the United States.

After all the hearings and reviews, the illegal alien is ordered deported and given a date to report to leave the country. This document is called a “run letter” aka “Notice to Disappear”. It means that the appeals have been exhausted and it is time to go into hiding. Fortunately, this isn’t very difficult. You get another fake name, fake ID, and blend in with the other 12 million people who are here illegally.

IF you have a “run letter” order and IF they pick you up again, and IF they are able to figure out who you really are…you are in the express lane to go back home. Otherwise, you can buy four or five years of extra time in the US just by playing the appeals process.

That’s why immigration attorneys always talk about the deportation process being “complex”, “nuanced”, and “complicated”. It also explains why they charge their clients thousands of dollars to move them through the process.

Here’s the actual press release:
http://justice.gov/eoir/press/07/ProBonoEOIRExpandsImprove.pdf

If any of my readers can explain how this works in relation to the end of catch and release as declared by Bush, I certainly would like to hear it.