Baseball wrestles with draft obstacles

The Detroit Tigers can feel certain about one thing: They have the No. 1 pick in the draft.

What that Major League Baseball Draft will look like, when and where it will take place, and how the selections will be made still aren’t clear.

“It’s going to present different challenges, probably,” said Scott Pleis, Detroit’s director of amateur scouting. “It’s just going to be different. It’s not going to affect the outcome, it’ll just be a different way of coming to that outcome.”

The NFL experienced that last week because of the coronavirus pandemic, conducting a remote draft with video screens, Zoom chats and other tech innovations that made the event popular with fans.

Normally, the college baseball season would be in full swing right now, giving major-league teams a chance to monitor top prospects in the weeks leading up to the draft. But with college and high school games shelved because of the virus outbreak, front offices can only do so much in what is clearly an abnormal year.

Every team faces similar obstacles.

MIAMI — U.S. immigration officials have told a Miami federal judge that the court has no authority over how the government chooses to detain and release immigration detainees, and that filing twice-weekly accountability reports to the court would be “unduly burdensome.”

Over the weekend, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency filed a response objecting to a recommendation made by Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman. Goodman’s 69-page recommendation — which will be reviewed by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke this week — says the agency should “substantially” reduce detainee populations at three south Florida centers as coronavirus positive cases continue to climb behind bars.

“The report’s directives as to how [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is to exercise its detention authority exceeds this court’s jurisdiction to adjudicate cases and controversies,” attorneys for the agency said. “There is no basis for this court’s oversight of [the agency’s] administration of its sound policies.”

Last week Goodman stopped short of recommending that roughly 1,200 detainees be released from the Krome Processing Center in Miami-Dade and Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach and the Glades County detention center in Moore Haven, but said the agency should be required to prove that it is accelerating the release process for noncriminal detainees by submitting twice-weekly reports. Those reports would have to detail the number of detainees who were released, as well as whether they are high-risk, subject to mandatory detention, or have no criminal record or pending criminal charges.

His recommendation also included having a “neutral, court-appointed expert” inspect the three centers and file a number of opinions and reports on whether the agency is following proper protocols.

“Such an order is unnecessarily broad, unduly burdensome and unwarranted,” the agency said in a court filing Friday, noting that “a twice-weekly report would not yield more meaningful information than a report filed once every two weeks, or, at a minimum, once a week.”

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said that the detainee population at Krome, Broward and Glades is managed by a number of workers including deportation officers and their assistants, making filing such frequent reports laborious and difficult.

The agency’s objection to Goodman’s recommendation is part of a lawsuit filed by immigration advocates earlier this month that sought the release of about 1,200 detainees inside the three facilities. Goodman said the court does not have the authority to issue such an order.

But the petitioners in the case — lawyers for the University of Miami’s immigration law clinic, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Rapid Defense Network in New York, Americans for Immigrant Justice, the Legal Aid Service of Broward County, private Miami law firm Prada Urizar and King & Spalding, an international firm based in Washington, D.C. — say Goodman “misunderstood the nature of the lawsuit” and “underestimated the court’s authority” in protecting detainees’ lives, describing his recommendations to the enforcement agency as “far too modest.”

The groups told the judge that the court does have the authority to order the release of detainees because other federal judges around the country have already done it.

They cited a federal court decision made as recently as Thursday, where the District Court for the Central District of California considered a nearly identical case and ordered the agency to immediately release detained individuals “so that remaining detained individuals could follow CDC guidelines for social distancing.”

Meanwhile, a federal judge on Monday required the agency to individually justify the detention of parents held longer than 20 days at family detention centers during the pandemic, expanding on a ruling that had earlier applied only to children.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of the District of Columbia said in a teleconference hearing that he doubted he had jurisdiction to order emergency releases from the enforcement agency’s family detention facilities as sought by immigrant advocates who filed a class-action suit on March 31 arguing that the facilities lack hygiene and social distancing standards to prevent coronavirus spread.

But Boasberg said he could address concerns about conditions faced by families who have not been charged with crimes, pose no public safety threat and are awaiting their requests for asylum to be processed.

Boasberg said about 620 family members — including 285 children — remain at the three facilities that hold families in Texas and Pennsylvania, down from 1,350 about two weeks ago and 826 last week.