In 2016, immigration judge V. Stuart Couch threatened to sic an attack dog on a two-year-old Guatemalan child who he felt was being too disruptive in his courtroom, yelling “I have a very big dog in my office, and if you don’t be quiet, he will come out and bite you!” There are so many things wrong with that sentence, but it only gets worse: last month, he got a promotion.
“In August, the Trump administration promoted Couch and five other judges to the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which often has the final say over whether immigrants are deported,” Mother Jones reports. “All six judges reject asylum requests at a far higher rate than the national average; Couch granted just 7.9 percent of asylum claims between 2013 and 2018, compared to the national average of about 45 percent.”
Couch is getting his new gig when advocates say he should have been removed from his post entirely for the 2016 incident. The boy was in court with his mom (some kids are forced to appear by themselves), when Couch felt he was being noisy. Some of us might call that, being two. Observers in the courtroom said Couch lost it, threatening “Want me to go get the dog? If you don’t stop talking, I will bring the dog out. Do you want him to bite you?” All translated into Spanish by an interpreter, so the boy could understand the threats.
“Kathryn Coiner-Collier, the only independent observer in the courtroom that day, says her mouth was on the floor as Couch made his threats. She sometimes saw Department of Homeland Security dogs sweeping the court building, and it was completely plausible to her that dogs could have been there that day,” Mother Jones continued. The incident was not recorded because Coiner-Collier said Couch turned off the courtroom’s recording device, but she “ferociously scribbled everything” he was spewing for an affidavit. After turning the device back on, Couch then “intentionally inflated” the boy’s age to five, because that’s so much less worse than threatening a two-year-old.
Couch’s supervisor, Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Deepali Nadkarni, told Coiner-Collier “that everything in the affidavit was corroborated by the internal investigation,” but Couch remained in his job. Nadkarni said Couch “acknowledged he did not handle the situation properly”—ya think?—“and assured me it will not occur again.” The boy and his mom were moved to another judge, and Couch stayed on as one too, even after admitting that “usually when I threaten children with scary animals, it works. Not with this kid.”
“I was outraged,” Coiner-Collier’s colleague, Kenneth Schorr, said about the incident. “I’ve been practicing law for over 40 years and I have never experienced judicial conduct this bad.” Judicial conduct that should have gotten him the boot under any administration, but has earned him a step up under this one, and a chance to perhaps attack this family again. Remember how they were moved to another judge? “The new judge denied them asylum. The mother appealed, and the case is pending before the appeals board that Couch is now a member of. “