Thread by @matt_cam

1/ BREAKING: @TheJusticeDept has just authorized immigration judges to deny #asylum applications without a hearing. Like most Trump-era administrative violence, it has been unnoticed & unreported.

*sound of Scotch pouring into glass*

THREAD

#TrumpImmigration #HereToStay

2/ Important context: As head of @TheJusticeDept, the Attorney General has final say over all cases before the administrative #immigration courts. AG may snatch a case away from the Board of Immigration Appeals anytime and decide it himself by directing BIA to refer it to him.

3/ Here is the 2014 BIA holding--upholding precedent from 1989--which the AG was so intent on getting to his own desk. It may not mean much to anyone who had the good sense not to go to law school, but take a shot. (No, really: *take an actual shot* and give it a try.)

4/ In E-F-H-L- (the 2014 case overruled by the AG today), an immigration judge took a cursory look at an asylum seeker's application and denied it on the spot *without even allowing him to testify.* The Board of Immigration Appeals had a problem with this.

Maybe you do too.

5/ Any judge denying any fact-based legal application without testimony is horrifying, but far more so when it's the life-and-death matters routinely raised in asylum proceedings. Just BASIC due process here.

Take the *actual facts of E-F-H-L-*--which, well just read them:

6/ Any experienced #immigration attorney would tell you that these are challenging facts for an asylum case. But any experienced human would recognize that these people have a legitimate fear of persecution, torture, and/or murder which deserves to be heard out.

7/ By vacating E-F-H-L, the Attorney General of the United States just effectively gave the green light to the nation's ~330 immigration judges to begin denying #asylum cases without listening to people who are throwing their actual lives upon the mercy of the courts

8/ This is awful. But it's also *exactly what AG Jeff Sessions told us that he intended to do* in a speech which he gave to a gathering of immigration judges last October. Best to believe people like him when they promise even-previously-unthinkable things like this:

9/ Sessions subsequently outlined his plans for the @TheJusticeDept immigration courts--including a massive, expedited surge in new immigration judges, hired directly by DOJ with no oversight from Congress. Here's my thread on that memo at the time:

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10/ As AG, Sessions has power to change the rules, the playing field, *and* the referees which asylum seekers navigate as they fight for their actual lives. Most without attorneys.

This is not conspiracy theory. It's conspiracy fact.

And it's happening right in front of us.

11/ BUT HOLD ON because I almost forgot to tell you where the Trump administration almost certainly got this idea from: An @splcenter-designated hate group with past and current white nationalist ties.

Here's their oddly-specific recent recommendation.

cis.org/Arthur/Expedit…