NO ROOM IN THE COURTHOUSES
Thousands of cases flood immigration courts in Memphis, across U.S.
A mother and daughter from Honduras-squeezed onto a bench in immigration court in downtown Memphis, awaiting their chance to talk to a judge about the girl’s asylum case. The 12-year-old had come to this country because a gang killed the girl’s uncle, the mom said later. “They took off his head,” she said in Spanish, and made a throat-cutting gesture.
The small courtroom was so full that they sat thigh-to-thigh with strangers. The nation’s immigration courts are packed, and that could slow down President Trump’s plans for mass deportations.
Immigrants travel hundreds of miles to Memphis Immigration Court, which has jurisdiction over cases in four states. Established in 1998, the court is handling more cases today than ever. Some immigrants may wait years for a final ruling on whether they can stay in the country.
President Trump has promised a large-scale crackdown on illegal immigration and is pushing to have more people quickly deported without a court hearing.
Yet that expedited removal process often doesn’t apply to immigrants who’ve been here more than two years. Many immigrants have the right to plead their case before an immigration judge if they’re threatened with deportation, attorneys say.
That means any immigration crackdown would run into the existing bottleneck in immigration courts.
“I think it’s gonna jam them up,” said Casey Bryant, director of the legal program at social services organization Latino Memphis.
She frequently visits immigration court and says some clients that she began representing in 2014 were supposed to have their asylum hearings this year. Those cases have now been reset to 2019.
Recognizing the backlog, Trump’s administration has proposed appropriating an additional $80 million to hire more immigration judges across the country. The proposal is subject to approval by Congress.
The Memphis Immigration Court covers Tennessee, Arkansas and north Mississippi. The Memphis court also handles Kentucky, with judges in Memphis hearing video cases from a site in Louisville.
Bryant recalls the words of an immigration judge: it’s an administrative court that has life-and-death consequences, since immigrants could be deported back into deadly danger in their home countries.
And it’s an adversarial system, since attorneys with Immigration and Customs Enforcement can challenge the immigrants’ cases. The government attorneys declined to comment for this story.
The Memphis court is handling 11,632 cases today, more than at any point in the past 20 years, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.Nationwide, immigration courts are handling 508,000 cases, far more than in recent years.
One of those cases is that of 12-yearold Angie Johnson Caballero. Her mother, Maria Caballero, 41, said the girl was a baby when she left her with relatives andcame to the United States to earn money for the family.
Angie spent years in the care of her grandmother and the girl’s uncle. Then a gang cut off the uncle’s head, the mother said.
The mother said the killing prompted her to send for her daughter. When the Angie was about 10 years old, the family hired a human smuggler to bring her to the U.S., but the trafficker abandoned the girl during the journey.
The girl continued alone, the mother said, until the Border Patrol caught her. Authorities detained the girl in Arizona for a month before releasing her to her mother.
Angie is now in school in Memphis, but a court has to decide if she can stay in this country permanently.
The surge in immigration from central American countries like Honduras that began in the summer of 2014 is one of the biggest reasons for the increased caseload at the Memphis Immigration Court, said Stacie A. Hammond, another staff attorney with Latino Memphis.
Many of these arrivals were children and today, many of those children have been released to relatives while their asylum cases are still pending in court.
Another factor accounts for the increased caseload: more immigrants are settling within the jurisdiction of the Memphis immigration court, she said.
In response to the demand, two more judges joined the Memphis court in June 2015,bringing the total to four .
Cases in Memphis have been pending for an average of 438 days, less than the national immigration court average of 673 days.
Still, the delays are significant. Many of the people wait years for an asylum hearing, a sort of trial in which they tell the judge why they fear returning to their home country.
Bryant, the other immigration lawyer, said long delays might help a person who has a weak claim for asylum. But delays also can hurt people with strong cases, because conditions in the home country can change and the evidence in the case can get stale.
The mother and daughter’s trip to immigration court didn’t begin well. They went to the wrong place: the court’s older, smaller location, at the federal building in Downtown Memphis. A security guard directed them to the larger location in an office building four blocks away, where the court moved in late 2014.
By the time they arrived in Judge Matthew Kaufman’s crowded courtroom, their lawyer was already working through a hearing with other clients. Soon that case was done, and the lawyer gestured for the mother and daughter to come up front.
They took seats at a table and put on black headphones to hear the court interpreter, a woman whispering into a microphone a few feet away.
The same interpreter would handle many other cases that day, including that of a 16-year-old boy who lives in Little Rock and appeared in court alone: no lawyer, no family sponsor.
In the courtroom next door, a male interpreter rendered Judge Charles Pazar’s words into Spanish, but one immigrant seemed confused. It turns out he speaks some Spanish, but his native tongue is a variant of a Guatemalan language called Q’anjob’al. The judge said he’d try to provide an appropriate interpreter next time.
In almost all the cases, the result was the same: the judge reset the case to another day and warned that if the immigrants didn’t come back, they could be deported. Judge Kaufman told the lawyer for the mother and daughter to file a formal asylum claim.
Then mother and daughter left the building and went back into the city, their future still uncertain. They’re to come back to court in March 2018.
Reach reporter Daniel Connolly at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.
Immigrants travel hundreds of miles to Memphis Immigration Court, which has jurisdiction over cases in all or part of four states: Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and north Mississippi.