Immigrants waiting 10 years in US just to get a court date- By Associated Press
U.S. immigration offices have become so overwhelmed with processing migrants for court that some some asylum-seekers who crossed the border at Mexico may be waiting a decade before they even get a date to see a judge.
The backlog stems from a change made two months after President Joe Biden took office, when Border Patrol agents began now-defunct practice of quickly releasing immigrants on parole. They were given instructions to report to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office at their final destination to be processed for court — work previously done by the Border Patrol.
The change prevented the kind of massive overcrowding of holding cells in 2019, when some migrants stood on toilets for room to breathe. But the cost became evident as ICE officers tasked with issuing court papers couldn't keep pace.
Offices in some cities are now telling migrants to come back years from now, and the extra work has strained ICE's capacity for its traditional work of enforcing immigration laws in the U.S. interior.
"We're being stretched to the limit," said Jamison Matuszewski, director of enforcement and removal operations in San Diego.
As for migrants, waits to get a court date vary. In New York, ICE told asylum-seekers this month to return in March 2033, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, said at a recent hearing. In nine other cities — San Antonio; Miramar, Florida; Los Angeles; Jacksonville, Florida; Milwaukee; Chicago; Washington; Denver; and Mount Laurel, New Jersey — the wait is until March 2027.
Until then, the migrants in question won't even get an initial court appearance on the books, though they can live and work in the U.S. After that, their case will work its way through the U.S. immigrant courts — a process that takes about four years amid a backlog that reached 2.1 million cases in January, up from about 600,000 in 2017.
"The asylum system is in dire need of reform from top to bottom," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters last week when asked about the waits for a court notice.
Tae Johnson, ICE's acting director, told lawmakers the agency wants to use online interviews to help cut the 10-year waits and that he wants congressional authority to issue court orders electronically. He also said more funding would go a long way toward "quickly eliminating" the backlog.
Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people show up at ICE offices seeking answers. A recent Government Accountability Office report mentioned one office — city unnamed — that saw 300 to 500 recent immigrants appear some days, mostly without appointments.
"The lines outside the building are just massive," said Camille Mackler, executive director of Immigrant ARC, a coalition of legal service providers in New York. "People are lining up the night before. It's been chaos."
ICE officials say it takes up to six hours to process a large family for court, fueling delays. ICE was responsible for 5.3 million cases of families and individuals not in custody at the end of February, up from 3.6 million 17 months earlier.
In March, a federal judge in Florida ordered the Biden administration to stop releasing migrants at the border with instructions to report to an ICE office. The administration didn't appeal that ruling but had virtually ended the practice known as humanitarian parole anyway as it implemented stricter immigration measures at the U.S.-Mexico border. There were only seven cases in March.
But ICE offices — particularly in cities such as New York and Miami that are the final destination for many migrants — are still dealing with a huge backlog.
In San Diego, which is not a final destination for many migrants and therefore not as affected, people showing up get court dates immediately. But there's still a line. Shortly after opening one recent morning, a receptionist had given out some two-dozen pagers for overflow visitors to wait in a cafeteria.
ICE also still must fulfill its role of deporting people in the United States — painstaking work that can require hours of surveillance for one person.
On a recent day in Oceanside, north of San Diego, about 10 agents convened in a shopping mall parking lot at about 4 a.m. to be briefed on a 49-year-old who had been returned to Mexico 17 times since 1999. U.S. authorities believed he smuggled migrants across the border, making him a priority.
"It's going to be quick and swift," the lead investigator told the team, advising them that the man leaves home between 5:50 a.m. and 6:10 a.m. When the man entered his car on a quiet cul-de-sac street 10 minutes early, officers in three vehicles with flashing lights pulled up to the front, back and driver's door.
No sirens were used and it was unlikely that neighbors were woken, except perhaps by the man's wailing cries for his mother as he was handcuffed against his car.
Matuszewski said he has shied away from knocking on doors and cajoling people outside to make arrests, partly because it has become widely known that officers generally lack court-ordered warrants and have no authority to enter.
"Now we focus more on watching when you leave the house, where you go, where's your business, where you stop in between," Matuszewski said.
Despite a $9-billion budget last year, ICE has always been limited by resources. Biden tried narrowing priorities to people deemed public safety or national security threats or recent border crossers in a case that the Supreme Court is expected to decide this year.
The GAO report found 75% of migrants paroled at the border reported to ICE as instructed.
Matuszewski is turning attention to those who fail to appear.
In February, he started issuing misdemeanor citations in the San Diego region with fines up to twice the value of the monitoring device. If successful, he hopes the tactic will be used nationally.
Funding to support oral histories in boarding school era- Associated Press
The U.S. government is embarking on an effort to record the oral histories of survivors and descendants of boarding schools that sought to "civilize" Indigenous students, often through abusive practices.
The Interior Department announced a partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities on Wednesday to document the experiences of thousands of Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students at federally funded schools across the country.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is contributing $4 million for the project.
"The first step toward addressing the intergenerational consequences of these schools is to squarely acknowledge and examine the history of a federal system intended to separate families, erase Native languages and cultures, and dispossess Native peoples of their land," National Endowment for the Humanities' chair Shelly Lowe said in a statement. Lowe is Navajo.
The endowment has supported other efforts, including a permanent exhibit on boarding schools at the Heard Museum in Phoenix and a project to digitize and transcribe records at the Genoa Indian School in Nebraska.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is a member of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, has prioritized publicly examining the trauma caused by the schools. The department released a first-of-its kind report pointing out 408 schools the federal government supported. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal funding and were willing partners in assimilating Indigenous students.
The U.S. enacted laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, most of which closed long ago. None still exist to strip students of their identities.
Victims and survivors of government-backed boarding schools have been sharing emotional stories during a "Road to Healing" tour organized by the Interior Department. They have recalled being locked in basements as punishment, hair being cut to stamp out their identities, and physical and mental abuse.
The Interior Department found in the first volume of an investigative report on boarding schools that at least 500 children died at some of the schools, though the number is expected to increase dramatically as research continues. A second volume is expected by the end of the year, the agency said.
The tour has made stops in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, the Navajo Nation and, most recently in Washington on the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
The oral history collection is an extension of the tour and comes at the request of Indigenous communities, Haaland said. It will ensure that future generations can learn from those stories, she said in a statement. "This is one step, among many, that we will take to strengthen and rebuild the bonds within Native communities that federal Indian boarding school policies set out to break," Haaland said.
US nuclear weapons modernization plan spurs cost questions-By Associated Press
The U.S. agency that oversees development and maintenance of the nation's nuclear arsenal is moving ahead with plans to modernize production of key components for the weapons, but some watchdog groups and members of Congress are concerned about persistent delays and cost overruns.
The National Nuclear Security Administration released its annual plan on Monday, outlining the multibillion-dollar effort to manufacture plutonium pits, the spherical cores that trigger the explosion in thermonuclear weapons, at national laboratories in New Mexico and South Carolina.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina faces a 2030 deadline to make 50 pits per year. Officials already have acknowledged they won't meet that timeline, and this year's report no longer includes a target date for Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, to meet its goal of 30 pits per year.
Last year's report had pegged 2026 as the year when manufacturing would be up and running at Los Alamos, which played a key role in the Manhattan Project during World War II and was the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
The top priority continues to be restarting production activities given the world's deteriorating security environment, Jill Hruby, head of the nuclear agency, recently told a congressional subcommittee. She pointed to Russia's development of new nuclear weapon delivery systems, China's growing capabilities, and destabilization in North Korea and Iran.
The NNSA is undertaking what Hruby described as a once-in-a-several-generation opportunity to reform and modernize the nation's nuclear enterprise. She acknowledged challenges when it comes to construction projects, supply chain delays, worker shortages and higher-than-expected inflation.
"We must adjust our cost estimates, delay starting additional large projects, and find innovative ways to successfully deliver," she said.
The Biden administration is requesting $18.8 billion for weapons activities, a 10% increase over spending for the last fiscal year. Modernization of production accounts for $5.6 billion of the request.
Members of congressional subcommittees blasted Hruby and top defense officials during hearings in recent weeks about the delays and the increasing price tag. Hruby acknowledged that it would be another year before her agency would have a full cost estimate.
The NNSA fell short when it came to having a comprehensive schedule for the project and ran the risk of delays and increasing budgets because its plans for reestablishing plutonium pit production didn't follow best practices, according to a January Government Accountability Office report.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts suggested during a hearing this month that the NNSA was making up its plan as it goes along and that the timeline would be extended even further.
"It is not unreasonable for Congress to ask you to tell us how long a project is going to take and how much it's going to cost in exchange for our forking over billions of dollars. And I suggest that's what NNSA be required to do before we give them another penny," Warren told Hruby.
U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, both Democrats from New Mexico, have been supportive of the work at Los Alamos. Lucrative government spending on weapons work and hundreds of jobs will result from restarting production. Neither senator responded to emailed questions about whether they were concerned about the slipping schedules.
The NNSA also did not immediately respond to an email about the schedule for work at Los Alamos.
Greg Mello with the Los Alamos Study Group, which advocates for nuclear disarmament, said ballooning schedules and budgets are hallmarks of incipient failure even in normal times and that the U.S. is facing economic turbulence that will only exacerbate the agency's problems.
"This is the other reason why NNSA has refused to provide a schedule and budget for pit production. It's too terrifying," he said.
2022 bad year for silvery minnow; officials optimistic for upcoming season- Source New Mexico
2022 hit the silvery minnow hard.
Federal agencies said the flash-drying of 50 miles in June of last year caused further harm to the endangered silvery minnow populations at the Rio Grande Compact commission Friday.
Federal officials were unable to collect any eggs in 2022, and there was no successful spawn.
This puts the short-lived fish on precipitous ground. The gap of an entire generation means the whole fish population loses out on genetic diversity.
“I dubbed it spawn or bust,” said Jennifer Faler, the area manager at the Bureau of Reclamation office in Albuquerque. “We really hit some alarm bells last year with the minnow population due to the hydrology.”
Faler said the Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Fish and Wildlife services have a series of plans for different drought conditions.
Federal officials were optimistic that the higher flows and the addition of 129,000 hatchery fish will bail out the 2023 generation, but there’s another wrinkle.
“Unfortunately, collecting eggs this year may actually be more difficult because the water is so high, but there are already ego monitors out in the river,” said Debra Hill, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist. “We’re really hopeful we’re going to get a spawn this year.”
Officials discussed the 2022 lawsuit brought by Santa Fe nonprofit WildEarth Guardians. A settlement session was extended from May 1 another 90 days. That period of talks between federal agencies and the nonprofit now ends in August.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife are assessing three other fish populations, the Rio Grande chub, the Rio Grande sucker and the Rio Grande cutthroat trout – all due in 2024.
NM courts adopt new online records system - Ryan Lowery,Source New Mexico
New Mexico court records are accessed daily by attorneys, law enforcement and members of the press. The state has allowed these groups the ability to access and download documents from a searchable online database for many years. In early April, that database was moved to a new interface, one that offers the state an opportunity to profit from its use.
The new online records platform, called re:Search, was adopted primarily to allow self-represented litigants to have online access to documents related to their cases, according to Barry Massey, the public information officer for the Office of the Courts.
It’s a group of users the previous system did not accommodate, and with the development of the new platform, the company who created both will no longer be offering updates to the older system, slated to be shut down May 5.
The new system comes at an annual cost of $250,000, and the New Mexico Administrative Office of the Courts has signed a three-year agreement with the system’s developer Tyler Technologies Inc., a software company based in Plano, Texas. After three years, the contract automatically renews each year unless it’s terminated by Tyler Technologies or the state.
A key feature of the new system is the ability to generate revenue from users, another thing absent from the former system. Basic accounts are free to those who qualify for access to the platform, but those users also have the option to pay for extra features, like the ability to search text within documents, save searches for easy access and to track cases and get alerts.
Two pay-tiers are offered. The first-tier limits access to these features to 15 uses of each per month. This costs users $30 per month, or $300 for the year. The highest-tier offers unlimited use of the extra features and costs $90 per month, or $900 annually.
Under the terms of the contract between the Office of the Courts and Tyler Technologies, portions of any revenue generated from these services, which the company calls “value-added features,” are to be shared with the Office of the Courts.
A percentage of revenue is distributed to the Office of the Courts through a tier-based plan that changes as the amount earned increases. Under the terms of the contract, the Office of the Courts receives 25% of any revenue generated up to $1 million. If revenue surpasses $1 million in a year, the courts receive 25% of the first $1 million, plus 35% of revenue up to $1.5 million. The courts would receive 50% of any revenue above $1.5 million in a year.
Massey said that any revenue generated from those value-added features will be used to cover the costs incurred by the Office of the Courts for daily technology operations. Those costs include the computer systems needed for the docketing and processing of court cases, the salaries of IT personnel and internet and email services.
The system was rolled out to all users on April 7, but Massey said an early version of re:Search launched in late 2018 for people representing themselves in civil suits. It was made available to attorneys in civil cases in November 2019 as the platform was still being fine-tuned.
At the start of 2022, attorneys who filed new applications for access to the online system were placed on the new re:Search platform. The option to pay for the extra features was also made available, and Massey said subscriptions to those services generated about $11,400 for the Office of the Courts that year.
“To put that into perspective, about $7.8 million was spent by (the Office of the Courts) on statewide technology in the 2022 fiscal year,” Massey said.
EASE OF ACCESS
New Mexico law requires that public bodies make documents and other records available for inspection to any member of the public, including members of the press.
By following the guidelines laid out in the Inspection of Public Records Act, or IPRA, members of the public can request to view a wide variety of public records, but agencies have up to 15 days to provide documents once a request is made. When it comes to access to court documents for members of the press, the system put in place by the Office of the Courts provides access to documents in the matter of seconds, far exceeding what is required by law.
Melanie Majors is the executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, a nonprofit dedicated to government transparency. She said because the records system more than meets the requirements of IPRA, and because users aren’t required to pay a fee to access records, NMFOG does not have a problem with the new platform offering enhanced features for a fee.
“Our main focus is that information is made available to the public, and it seems like they have fulfilled that aspect of the law,” Majors said. “Whether or not they charge additional money for what is clearly an additional service, I really don’t have a comment on because they are providing what is required by law.”
A TRUE MULTI-USE SYSTEM
The re:Search platform is used in different ways by those who’ve been granted access to it, and the paid features are potentially more valuable to certain users.
Brett Phelps is a criminal defense attorney in northern New Mexico. He recently started using the new platform but hasn’t paid for access to the extra features. However, he said it’s something he’d consider because he thinks it could be useful in finding potential expert witnesses for his cases.
“That is a new function that I think would be helpful,” he said. “I don’t know that there’s any other way right now to look up through a database when people have testified as expert witnesses.”
Phelps would consider paying for the extra features at the first tier of $300 per year, but said it would be hard to justify paying $900 a year for access to additional features. But he does think the more expensive tier could be useful to attorneys that handle civil cases.
“For example, if you’re doing cannabis law in New Mexico, that’s going to be a rapidly developing area of the law,” he said. “To have an alert when businesses file lawsuits related to the cannabis industry … I could see a lot of benefit from that.”
While court records are most often accessed by lawyers and people who work in the court system, the press also uses these documents in order to cover important court cases, trials and other criminal justice stories.
Journalists operate under the pressure of a unique time frame, Algernon D’Ammassa said. D’Ammassa is the editor of The Deming Headlight, but he also serves as a reporter for the paper that covers southwest New Mexico.
“Anything that adds time to a reporter’s already busy schedule adds stress,” he said. “The big functional problem I’m having is that I’m getting a lot of error messages when I’m trying to download documents.”
D’Ammassa uses an Apple computer when accessing records, and he said he encountered the bulk of issues while using Safari, Apple’s internet browser. After downloading Firefox, he said things seemed to work a lot better.
A learning curve was expected while adjusting to a new platform, D’Ammassa said, but much of the extra time he’s spent has been submitting tickets to Tyler Technologies’ help desk after receiving error messages. He said customer service is quick to respond, but their solutions to his problems are typically generic ideas like trying a specific link or trying a different browser.
Still, D’Ammassa remains optimistic about the future of the new platform, and what if offers journalists.
“One impression that I’m getting is this is a system that offers a lot of information, it’s just putting it right up on the dashboard, and it’s a lot of information I don’t often, or ever, check,” he said. “But I think I’ll get used to that.”