Should a 3 year old represent herself in court? According to the Department of Justice the answer is ‘yes’ so long as it’s a foreign child in immigration court.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
A senior Justice Department official is arguing that 3- and 4-year-olds can learn immigration law well enough to represent themselves in court … Jack H. Weil, a longtime immigration judge who is responsible for training other judges, made the assertion in sworn testimony in a deposition in federal court in Seattle.
Obviously, this is absurd but it fucking happens. I’ve been an immigration attorney for 15 years and I’m constantly appalled at how badly we treat children in immigration. The government gets several lawyers but the children get none. They often don’t speak English and interpreters aren’t always even in the room with them. Rocket dockets let judges deport them with the use of video. Kos pointed out that they keep kids in kennels. The article mentions that Mr. Weil — the government’s expert witness — made these claims in a deposition in a lawsuit by the ACLU. The EOIR is trying to walk back his statements by saying this doesn’t happen but it does.
According to Justice Department figures, 42 percent of the more than 20,000 unaccompanied children involved in deportation proceedings completed between July 2014 and late December had no attorney. It is unclear how often children 5 or younger are forced to defend themselves, but attorneys and advocates for immigrants said it does happen.
It’s vitally important if we want to stop these things that we speak out against this. Yes, the GOP is the bad party but this is the Obama Administration’s doing. It was Obama’s administration that created the “rocket dockets” for the young children. It was Hilary Clinton — not Donald Trump — that urged the deportation of these kids to ‘teach their parents a lesson.’
You can help on these issues in real ways. An easy start is to support and join the ACLU, who has always been in the right on the immigration fight. But contact your Senators. Senator Reid has already spoken out against the treatment of children in detention and offered up a bill to fix it.
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Democrats this month introduced a bill mandating government-appointed counsel for children in immigration court who had crossed the border alone or are victims of other duress such as abuse, torture or violence. In a Feb. 11 speech on the Senate floor, Reid said he was told about one case in which a 5-year-old girl was brought before an immigration judge. “This little girl was clutching a doll and was so short she could barely see over the table to the microphone,’’ Reid said. “She was unable to answer any questions that the judge asked her except for the name of her doll: ‘Baby Baby Doll.’ That was the name of her doll.”
How we are treating these kids is unamerican and we should push all politicians — including democrats — on this issue. Immigration reform shouldn’t be the right-wing political issue. It should be a prominent progressive issue.