 This is a panel that'll kind of take us from the level of doctrine that we're at before into the trenches. We've got a bit of a flavor of that with Professor Atmott's talk about what it was like to do these twin pieces litigation, the DACA case and the travel ban case. We'll pick up on that in this hour in terms of looking at the real stakes for real people of immigration law, how that involves fact finding in a number of different forums from immigration court to citizenship and immigration services office, could be a lawyer's office, could be an asylum office and a lot of it also has to do with counseling clients. Some of those matters also occur in a criminal courtroom and state court because as we've discussed before immigration and criminal law interlinked. Criminal convictions have real-world immigration consequences for the next hour and 15 minutes. We're delighted to have a number of speakers with us in that capacity. Our first speaker is going to be Shoba Wadiya who's here remotely. She wanted to be here in person very badly but she couldn't get a flight out of Penn State to get here in time for the conference. So we talked about the travel ban earlier. Turns out that even traveling within the country can be problematic. The good news is that we do have Shoba here remotely thanks to the miracles of modern technology and our expert IT department as well as the expert IT department at Penn State. Shoba is the director of the Center for Immigrants Rights Clinic at Penn State. She's a longtime advocate for immigrants for 20 years. She is amongst other things the drafter of the letter you may have heard about that's been referenced on the newsletter of 100 law professors on behalf of the legality of the DACA program. Shoba is also the author of a wonderful book that I strongly recommend to you courtesy of NYU Press which is beyond deportation the role of prosecutorial discretion in immigration cases. Comprehensive study of the very important subject of the discretion that the government has over the lives of immigrants. Our next panelist will be Luis Monsenio. Luis is first and foremost and an alumnus of the School of Law at Roger Williams University but that's only one of his many accomplishments. He's also written up and a wonderful feature story in the New York Times. Gee, I wish that would happen to me. He's been a fellow at Cardozo Law School in New York City and before that and now he is an attorney at a wonderful really path-breaking organization that has a longtime relationship with this law school and that is the Bronx Defenders really on the front lines of representing immigrants and other folks with issues in the criminal justice system. Then we have Lenny Benson who is a professor at New York Law School where she is executive director of the Safe Passage Project. Lenny has for years tirelessly labored on behalf of kids dealing with the difficult issues that kids face in the immigration system. Tough enough for an adult to deal with the uncertainty of immigration, you just imagine that a hundred times over what it's like for a kid. And then last but most definitely not least we have Mark Noffrey who is with the Executive Office's immigration review of the Justice Department, the United States Department of Justice. That agency is otherwise known as the immigration court, a vital agency for the adjudication of asylum claims and other claims involving immigrants. Mark is also someone who's been long active on immigration law and policy issues. Among other things he worked at the American Immigration Council. He worked at Brooklyn Law School and with the committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. I also have to say on a personal note everyone in this field immigration is just a remarkably decent person that's one great kind of fringe benefit of working the field. I have to say that Mark's decency and integrity are second to none. Thanks. Shobha, go ahead. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Professor Marbelies. Can you all hear me? Yes. Okay, great. I'm sorry to not be there in person and I hope that the few minutes I spend with you virtually bring value. I thought I'd spend a few minutes talking about discretion, which plays an important role as we think about immigration enforcement and access to justice. As you've probably seen from the earlier panels and heard, immigration law is complex and derives from many sources. The immigration statute has been compared second in complexity to the US tax code and outlines many of the features and elements that you've learned about so far, like who might qualify for admission temporarily or permanently, what type of relief might be available for somebody who is fleeing harm or facing removal. And there are several agencies that carry out this immigration law, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. You'll hear more about that momentarily. And despite all of this complexity, the laws we have and the agencies who carry it out, there is this important concept of discretion in the immigration system. And it was quoted by Justice Kennedy in the Arizona case as follows, quote, discretion in the enforcement of immigration law embraces immediate human concerns. The equities of an individual case may turn on many factors, including whether the alien has children born in the United States, long time ties to the community or a record of distinguished military service, end quote. And so one of the most powerful forms of discretion in immigration law is called prosecutorial discretion or PD. And it refers to the choice that the Department of Homeland Security, as opposed to a judge makes about whether to bring enforcement actions against a person or a group of persons. And PD has operated in the immigration system for as long as the system has been in existence. And there are three major underpinnings to PD. The first is economic. The agency has resources to deport 400,000 or less than 4% of the 11.2 million people living in the US without authorization. And so choices have to be made about who to target for removal and who to place on the back burner. The second dimension is humanitarian and Justice Kennedy really highlights the humanitarian dimension of all discretion, but PD as well, where there are individuals who are living in the US with compelling qualities or equities like long term residents, or a family relationship that may warrant short term protection from removal. And then finally, there's this political dimension to prosecutorial discretion when Congress fails to act or acts in ways that minus his discretion on the part of judges. There are more demands that are placed on the executive to do something through discretion. And so these are the three theories that have always underlined prosecutorial discretion. And one question that has really received a lot of attention in the last few years is whether prosecutorial discretion is legal. And there are several authorities that tell us the answer is yes, beginning with the take care clause of the US Constitution and the responsibility for the president to ensure that the laws of the United States are thankfully executed. And the US Supreme Court has long found that prosecutorial discretion is part of this faithful execution. Section 103 of the Immigration and Nationality Act is a critical section where Congress delegated to the Department of Homeland Security the authority to enforce the immigration laws of the United States. And this has long been identified as the helm within the immigration statute guiding the authority for prosecutorial discretion. And other authorities are in the regulations memoranda other parts of the statute. And you can read the letter that was alluded to by Professor Margulies by 105 law professors and an open letter to President Trump on August 14, defending the legality of DACA. A little bit more on that in a few minutes. So what does immigration enforcement and discretion look like in the Trump administration? In January, President Trump signed three executive orders and two pertained to immigration enforcement. One to enforcement at the border, and the second to enforcement on the interior of the United States. And there were several elements to this interior enforcement executive order. But one was to refashion and reframe the administration's enforcement priorities. And the priorities that are listed in that order include not only the crime security and misrepresentation related grounds of deportability and an invisibility in the immigration statute, but also seem to go much further than that to reach for example, those who commit acts that may constitute a criminal or chargeable criminal offense. So unresolved crimes or somebody who is a visa overstay and also J walks in a jurisdiction where J walking is a chargeable offense could conceivably be considered a priority under a plain reading of this executive order. So beyond these orders were guidance documents published by the Department of Homeland Security in February of this year, seeking to interpret what these executive orders mean. And throughout these guidance documents as the following expression, quote, all of those in violation of the immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and a found removable by final order removal from the United States. And so when you see the language like this plastered throughout a guidance document, and then also uttered in the words of the administration, our president, one is left with the impression or at the very least fear that everyone is a priority. This cumulative effect of using expressions that say that all those in violation of the immigration law almost throw priorities out the window and make any person who's here without authorization a supposed priority. So a natural question for me as somebody who researched his prosecutorial discretion, and for the public is whether prosecutorial discretion is dead, right? Because beyond this language in the guidance documents are also choices that were made by the administration to revoke or rescind pre existing guidance on prosecutorial discretion. So one key document that was rescinded as a result of this administration's policies was the J. Johnson priorities memo published in November 2014, named after the former secretary of Homeland Security, J. Johnson. And the Johnson priorities memo was an important document because it laid out what the prosecutorial discretion policy was for the administration. And it indicated, for example, those with age issues, health, pregnancy, and so on, to be the types of factors that should be warranted a favorable exercise of discretion. What is unknown is whether other prosecutorial discretion guidance is rescinded or not. There's an outstanding FOIA to determine that particular question. Separate from the rescission of the Johnson priorities memo in the summer was a rescission of DAPA or deferred action for parents of Americans and legal residents. And while the program itself was never operational because of litigation, the message such a rescission sends to the public, or to me at least, is that parents are at most priority and at least unwelcome. And what can I tell you about DACA or deferred action for childhood arrivals? Perhaps it's been addressed in earlier remarks today. It was a policy announced in June 2012. It has enabled nearly 800,000 people who came to the US before the age of 16 are in school or graduated and meet other requirements to receive a type of prosecutorial discretion known as deferred action. And on September 5, the end of DACA was announced. And how did we get here? Well, we had mixed messages through and through, beginning from when the campaign of the current president began. There were campaign promises to end the policy. And after inauguration, there were mixed messages of protecting and dreamers or DACA recipients having nothing to fear to news stories about a DACA recipient who was picked up or deported. And then in late June, several states led by the state of Texas, wrote a threat letter to the administration, saying that if you don't pull DACA from by September 5, we will sue you. So I think very much in reaction to this threat letter to sue was this announcement by the Attorney General on September 5 in a press conference announcing the end of DACA. And it's important to note that during this press conference, there was one law professor cited in contrast to the 105 law professors who wrote a letter defending the legal legality of DACA. DACA was declared super statutory and unconstitutional. And yet there was very little legal analysis provided to the American public of exactly what was behind that. And then finally, the Attorney General took no questions. And so in reaction to an announcement, we're sending a program that was within the jurisdiction of an other department, and in the absence of the president, and without real legal authority and teeth, I can only call that press conference legally dishonest and dehumanizing. And so by the terms of the DACA, recision, anybody who currently has DACA retains deferred action and work authorization, the renewal application period for those who had expiration dates between now and March 5 ended on October 5. And the agency has calculated that more than 30,000 individuals who did qualify for renewal did not make an application. So what does the future of discretion hold? The future is uncertain. On the one hand, the Department of Homeland Security has indicated that prosecutorial discretion can still be exercised on a case by case basis. And this makes sense to some degree, even without that guide post, because prosecutorial discretion itself is inevitable. The agency has limited resources. And so everyone can't actually be the subject of immigration enforcement. But in my view, how discretion is exercised really matters. If we are in a landscape where no one is a priority, there's real reason to believe that haphazard enforcement, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time is what our enforcement policy looks like. Another concern is a tool that is used by the administration to carry out immigration enforcement, such as enforcement actions or what some point as raids last month, 500 undocumented individuals were apprehended in a four day sweep by immigration customs enforcement. The largest city targeted was Philadelphia in the state of Pennsylvania, where I reside, and still am having not been able to get on a plane to you. So the real concern of how enforcement is carried out is real. And so what is at stake in my view is a breakdown of discretion and the rule of law. And I really hope the administration rethinks its priorities and chooses to use prosecutorial discretion in a fair manner. Thank you. You know, I've done so many of these presentations on panels, especially after being a teaching fellow at Cardozo during last year, but there's a different type of pressure when you have your professors watching you here. First of all, I just want to thank the law school. Thank you, Professor Margulis, for inviting me here. Thank you to everybody who's part of the law review and administration for organizing this really, really awesome and cool event. As Professor Margulis mentioned before, I am an immigration attorney of the Bronx Defenders right now. I have been representing people for about six years who are facing deportation proceedings and who are detained. Most of the clients who I have represented during those past six years are people who have criminal convictions. As I was thinking about what I wanted to share with you guys today, I started thinking about like so many of the things that are wrong in our immigration system, and there are just so many. But I really think that it's important for me to talk a little bit about access to counsel. For the people who are not very familiar with our immigration system, people who are facing deportation proceedings have the right to have a counsel present with them in immigration court. However, that counsel cannot be paid by the US government. What does that mean? It means that you have people who are not able to have an attorney with them when they are defending themselves against one of the most extreme forms of punishment that we have here in the US, which is deportation permanent exile without having the help of an attorney. Meaning that if you are too poor to pay for an immigration lawyer, which usually is who usually are expensive, you just don't get to have one. And you have to face trained immigration attorney from the government, often in the language that you do not speak. And like I say, face one of the harshest consequences. And I talk about access to counsel not only because it impacts every single one of the individual cases of people who are going through deportation proceedings, but access to counsel really means that you have people who are looking into our immigration laws and the way that they are applied and verifying whether those immigration laws are one constitutional and two, whether those immigration laws are being applied correctly by the people who are involved in adjudicating them. And I have to say, and it's going to be a little extreme that I'm going to just cite to a speech that attorney general sessions gave yesterday. But in his speech at the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review, attorney general sessions said that the nation's policies allowed too many asylum seekers to exploit loopholes in a broken, extreme backlog process. And then he said, the system is being gamed. Over the years, smart attorneys have exploited loopholes in the law, court rulings, and lack of resources to substantially undermine the intent of Congress. What is he trying to say here to certain extent is, you know, people who are immigration attorneys or in general lawyers are starting to find out that there are things that you can do under immigration law that for years, for years people did not have access to, right? And specifically, I want to talk about an aspect of our immigration system, where access to counsel made a huge difference. And I'm going to point to a case in point on specifically the area of immigration detention. Let me tell you a little bit and give you a little bit of background on this. Why to talk about immigration detention? First of all, the U.S. government, for people who don't know here, has the legal authority, or unless they allegedly have the legal authority, to detain and put people behind bars every time that they believe that somebody is deportable. It doesn't matter if you have been convicted of a crime. If the U.S. government believes that you have violated an immigration law and you are deportable from the U.S., they have the authority to put you behind bars. Not only that, but also for certain groups of people the U.S. government alleges or understatue that those people should not be allowed to be released from detention during the pendency of their removal proceedings. So there are certain categories under the Immigration and Nationality Act of people that are under what it's called mandatory detention. For those people, it does not matter, right? For how long you are detained, you do not have access to what it's called a bond hearing. Meaning, at this moment, there's a case in front of the Supreme Court. The case in point is Jennings v. Rodriguez. And the Supreme Court right now will be deciding on whether this provisions under the Immigration and Nationality Act are constitutional. When I worked as an immigration attorney in Arizona, I met somebody who had been in removal proceedings back and forth through appeals on what else, detained for eight years. Somebody had been detained for eight years without having access to a bond hearing. When I talk about a bond hearing, people might wonder what a bond hearing is, but what a bond hearing is what you have in criminal court, which means pretty much having a judge trying to determine whether the person presents a danger to the community, one, and two, whether the person is at flight risk, meaning are they going to be coming back to immigration court later, right? However, these types of people in these types of categories do not have access under the Immigration and Nationality Act to have these bond hearings. Now, in 2014 for the first time in history, in New York, we're able to find the money to fund a program that allows to have universal representation for every single person who is detained and facing deportation proceedings in New York. So every single person who is detained in New York and is in deportation proceedings gets to have a lawyer. And you know what that did? The moment that, and I was one of the first NYFA attorneys, NYFA bids the name of the program, the moment that we enter into the field, and we started realizing that this was going on, we said this is unfair. Our clients are behind bars. There's no way that our clients should be behind bars. They do not present a danger to the community. They will be coming back to court because they have a form of relief under our immigration laws. Why are they being detained? So what we did is we started filing habeas court petitions in front of the district court in the southern district of New York. One of those cases eventually made it to the Second Circuit. And in 2015, Laura B. Shannon Hen was deciding. And in Laura B. Shannon Hen, the Second Circuit decided that every single person who was under one, detained under one of these provisions of the INA is specifically, INA 236C should have access to a bond hearing within six months of their detention. It's not that we were asking the government to just release everybody. All that we were asking to the courts is to allow them to have a legal process, to allow them to have due process to be able to determine whether their freedom should be taken away or not, depending on their circumstances. You might be wondering what's the difference between criminal detention and immigration detention. And I'm going to just read you something that Justice Soto Mayor said during the oral argument for Jennings B. Rodriguez about a week ago or less than a week ago. She's asking the attorney for the government and she goes, in which ways is immigration detention different than criminal detention? She continues, I mean, I understand right now that when you detain non-citizens, you put them in orange suits. They are shackled during visitation and court visits. They're subject to surveillance and a street searches. They're referred to by number, not by name. So in which ways is immigration detention different than criminal detention? And I ask you that question after reading that. Is there any difference between immigration detention and criminal detention? And the answer if you ask me is no. There's no difference. However, for years we have had this system in our country that has prevented people taking people away from their families and their communities and taking away their freedom without providing them with due process. Under our criminal justice system given federal or state law, every single person who's processed through the criminal justice system at some point has the ability to access a judge and ask for a bail hearing to determine whether their freedom should be taken away or not. Unfortunately for certain groups of people in our immigration context, that is just not the case right now. And I'm going to leave you with this. One of the really cool things about the decision in the Laura B Shanahan case is that not only we were able to get bond hearings for people within six months, but also one of the things that we were able to do is that we shifted the burden from the respondent, the respondent is the person, the non-citizen, to the government. Because every single one of the bond hearings that you had before, just think about this. You have somebody let's say from Guatemala who came to the U.S. in 2004 in 2014 for some reason he was put into deportation proceedings and during those deportation proceedings it was his burden even if he was represented and he was not represented by an attorney to prove that he was not a danger to the community and that he was not a fly risk. It was not the government's burden to prove why they were jailing him. It was his burden to prove that he was not he was not one of those two things. So one of the things that we were able to do in Laura is we were able to convince the Second Circuit to shift that burden to the government because the government should have their burden of proving why the government is taking somebody's freedom away, right? So that changed things completely absolutely the way that we were representing people in New York more than anything because a lot of the resources that we were using as attorneys were used to get people out of jail get people out of immigration detention and just to give you a number in 2011 there was a study group that was put together in New York I think that Lenny was actually part of the study group maybe Mark as well and in the study that was published in 2011 they found the following only three percent of people who were detained and didn't have a lawyer had success in their immigration cases meaning they were able to prevent their deportation that compared to 74 percent of people who were not detained and who had access to an attorney so that right there tells you the huge gap and the huge difference that getting people out of jail first has and second having access to a counsel and all of these things wouldn't have been possible without Mr. Laura who was the person whose case went in front of the Second Circuit to be able to be able to generate all of these changes one last thing before I know that I I need to finish I'm just gonna leave you with the story of Mr. Laura because I think that is very telling of some of the of the themes that I'm that I'm talking about today Alexander Laura is a lawful permanent resident meaning that he had a green card from the Dominican Republic who lived in the U.S. since he was seven years old Mr. Laura was placed into removal proceedings and detained based on a 2010 drug offense for which he had been sentenced to probation with no jail time meaning that when he went and was prosecuted for that drug offense he never had to serve a single day in jail he just got probation his immigration detention without bond forcibly separated Mr. Laura for the first time from his family in Brooklyn he left behind his fiancee his alien mother for whom he was provided he lost his job and he lost he lost his two-year-old son who was placed placed into forced foster care all of those things he lost to immigration detention even though he was eligible for immigration relief meaning he had a way of defending himself against deportation he still didn't have the ability to get out of immigration jail and it was thanks to the works of the attorneys who worked together eventually we were able to get a $5,000 think about that $5,000 for somebody who had never spent a single day in jail for whose conviction had already passed four years to be able to be for him to be reunited with his family and his community last thing Mary Ellen talked about the future being a little cloudy and I often feel like that for sure but I do think that people like you law students and people who are energized about all the things and outrage about all the things that you're hearing every day are really the future so I see you and I see a lot of hope in what I think that you could do with your law degree on what you could do in the future as lawyers to protect our constitution to protect our communities and to really make this our future a little brighter thank you so hello everyone thank you for being here today I'm Lenny Benson I'm going to talk to you about children or children first I have 35 slides there's no way we're going to spend enough time on them so I want to say as a caveat at the beginning that if you're interested in this topic if you'll visit safe passage projects website which is up there on the slide right now under resources you'll find manuals videos testimony all different kinds of things that will help you go deeper and learn more and I would say that if anyone wants a copy of these slides they can contact me I would send you PDFs of those slides so please feel free to say I want to learn more I too also want to thank you Peter the law review the law school my colleagues who have spoken today I like to say when I do this speech that there isn't a person in the room who couldn't change a person's life so I am an academic and I do study and write about this field and I teach in this field but I also on my extra time created a pro bono project that's grown into a non-profit that is currently representing 700 children and adds between 150 to 300 cases a year so we've closing cases and we're adding cases and the way that I was able to do that was going into rooms like this saying listen to this and then stand up and do something so are there people in the room right now who are non-profit organizations that do anything with immigration because I met you okay you guys see these people over here if you're a lawyer in this area go talk to those people over here and then you wonderful people over there we're going to connect right so I'll share my resources with you and you can share resources with them and there is a really great community of mentoring and if you're here with law enforcement government or DHS you too have a role to play in this because what my thesis is today is that the system we're using right now to adjudicate children's claims of protection or adjudicate the right to remain in the United States was cobbled together maybe we could say it's like putting grandpa's raincoat on a toddler it's not it might keep the kid dry a little bit but it's hard to maneuver it's hard to see the kid inside there and it really is ill-fitting and so I'm going to try to illustrate that for you so one of the problems I think in adjudicating children's claims is the numbers began to rapidly grow and this is very similar to Mary Ellen Fullerton's talk when the EU is overwhelmed by such large numbers oh is it Mary Ellen three million in Turkey a million plus more so let's double that okay so are we overwhelmed in the last three years the United States has had about 203,000 children apprehended at our southern border this is a time of dropping apprehensions despite what the political rhetoric might be at our southwest borders well and there's not many apprehensions of children at our north borders or our ports of entry at the airports so are we overwhelmed we're a country of 330 million people 203,000 people if we had to fit them in this room seems like a lot but this is over three years and I think it's a country we're capable of dealing with this instead the reaction we're seeing both in the agencies that adjudicate the claims and in Congress is a kind of really over reactive panic this is just to give you some idea of children placed into removal all children apprehended at the southwest border but for Mexican children are placed into removal proceedings so we see there was about 800 8,000 cases close to 9,000 and then it leaps in 2014 2015 2016 by 2016 it was representing 20% of the docket cases going into the immigration courts now you've heard phrases in the media and maybe you would agree the immigration courts have too big a workload there's a little over 300 judges and 625,000 cases and you can find that waits are quite long in many places but a lot of this work is also children median age of 14 being placed into removal so one of the things I want to say to you is did we have to approach the problem this way this is a graph taken last week from the track center some of you who do research in the field know that Syracuse University is a standard FOIA request where they get and update lots of information of immigration statistics and they're showing that as of the last time this report was made there was about 21,000 new juvenile cases added last year so in 2014 when we saw that big spike where it went up to several 50,000 plus cases suddenly added the government said this is a humanitarian crisis and the way they talked about arresting children at the border putting them into shelter care putting them all into removal was as if it was a kind of child welfare system they were worried about trafficking they were worried about the children being victimized and so they said we're going to this is a chart I know you can't read it this is all the various steps that what happened to unaccompanied children after they're arrested they are taken into care I think Louise and I would call it detention they don't wear orange colored jumpsuits but they are locked up and whether it's in a foster care placement in a house that's locked up or a severe lock up facility the children at this point in 2014 were spending about 50, 60 days in detention on average it's down to 34 days but it was for some of the children I've met it's six months, 10 months in detention most however are released to their relatives so in part we have to say there's two factors going on here we have children seeking relatives in the United States that's why they're not going to Nicaragua or they're not going to Colombia oh I should have said the majority of these children are from Central America the vast majority the Northern Triangle I'm sorry I left out this slide Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras so when they're released to their relatives part of that is a desire for family safety family reunification but another part of it is why are the children making this incredibly dangerous journey where many anecdotal evidence will say there's Catholic Charities supported they believe that at least 80% of the children female and about 60% of the children male are physically or sexually assaulted during the journey so it's incredibly dangerous journey why are they doing this because these three nations are in the top five most dangerous places in the world the highest murder per capita rates according to the United Nations so I was speaking in a church recently and it suddenly dawned on me this is the story of Moses in the bulrushes Miriam his sister and the mother of Moses whose name is not in the bible does not want to give up their child Moses but Pharaoh has said all the firstborn sons of the Israelites will be killed so what do you do you put your kid into the basket and you hope something better will happen this is not different than children being put on trains or boats trying to get them out of war zones all over the world and the UN will tell you that a growing proportion of displaced people and refugees are women and children in fact it's representing about 50% now of the movement of people so in 2014 we see that everyone's arrested everyone's put into removal taken into detention but many are released to relatives within a relatively short period of time and then the government feels a little conflicted about this I think because of the huge numbers and the EOAR the immigration court and the corporation for national community service create justice americorps the first government somewhat funded there's not very much money we can all hire a lawyer for $19,000 a year that's how much it was gave grants throughout the country and this is the picture of the first core of the justice americorps and the idea was that these 50-60 young legal professionals paralegals and lawyers would spread out across the country and they would be there as screeners and try to assist young people to find counsel as you already heard from Luis it makes a tremendous difference what's the response in 2017 after the president announced his list of rules or concepts or principles that are non-negotiable for the administration if we're going to have a restoration of DACA one of the things he said is he's adopting an approach that some members of congress have suggested we will detain all children at the border and within a period of 48 hours to 7 days we will adjudicate whether or not they have an asylum claim while they're in detention without counsel and if they do not have a severe trafficking claim or a recognized asylum claim they will be returned to their country of origin now under existing law we do have an agreement with Mexico because Mexico has assured us the children returned into a child welfare agency that's actually not true and there's lots of reports by Amnesty International and others that show that but we haven't reneged on that agreement with Mexico with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador current law requires us to make sure the child is placed in a safe environment and we really can't do that so we haven't been repatriating Central Americans at a rapid pace we have been putting them into removal so my thesis now turns to whether the president wants to change it to expedited adjudication at the border or the current system we have where kids are arrested detained released to relatives and then everyone is in removal court is that the best way to adjudicate claims this chart which again I'm sure you can't read are what the government might call loopholes but what I call statutory grants of protection all of these little boxes are forms of potential relief that a child could qualify for under existing domestic law these boxes which I've made yellow or blue or bigger are the main forms of relief for children especially the special immigrant juvenile status which you're going to hear in the last panel today or a child's claim for asylum but notice that these things I've colored them differently because the immigration judge is not the original forum or place to hear this claim instead the child has to do something like this picture apprehended by border patrol taken into foster care released to a family member go to the immigration court now go to family court now work in family court now file a petition with the USCIS now get that adjudicated hopefully within 180 days although they're not doing it anymore then turn to bring it back to the immigration court and then maybe if everything is good and the quote is not backlogging you can apply for adjustment of status what can the immigration court do this forum that we think is the right place to put all these children's cases well there's under agreement right now that all these children go to apply for asylum before the USCIS not before the immigration court in the first instance and that is really appropriate in some ways because it's an informal non-adversarial interview and the asylum office responded in the beginning by expediting these cases so originally went from the time you filed you might get a three-week interview a four-week interview sadly with the volume of work and the lack of resources and the deferment of staff to the southern border we now are seeing five-month six-month delays even for children's cases and if you're an adult and you're applying for asylum because the kids' cases are prioritized you may have a three-year wait special immigrant juvenile status usually adjudicated completely before the USCIS after you've completed your family court again you're going to hear about that later family petitions where someone might be sponsoring you could lead determination but those are done by USCIS you visas for victims of crime TV visas for victims of traffic being they're not adjudicated by the immigration court they're done by USCIS so why are we in immigration court at all? immigration court is the wrong forum the wrong place to be adjudicating protection claims for children and prosecutorial discretion which Shobha talked about so beautifully and eloquently in 2016 represented 39% of all the immigration cases what does that mean? why 40% of the time was the government closing the cases? because they never should have been brought in the first place because we don't have a system where prosecutors decide which cases go into the immigration court we have assembly line justice where officials within customs and border protection and within ICE who are doing their job believe they have no discretion that they have to write up the charging document and they lodge it with the court it doesn't go through the funnel of being reviewed by an attorney first imagine if the police took everything to court without the DAs or the IRS let their agents bring everything to court without going through agency process what would happen to your courts? so this is just a picture of the screening room we had until last month at the New York immigration court the court is expanding the government's response to the crush of cases is to add more judges so they're dividing the screening room into three new court rooms and we're there with students and volunteers and lawyers because as you've already heard no one's entitled to a free lawyer Justice AmeriCorps has been defunded by the Trump administration and even then it was only a few hundred kids that were getting represented here's just another picture of the process I'm not going to repeat it but I held this sign up at the White House to try to explain all the different fora that touched just one kind of case and it had the negative reaction I meant it to be positive like look at that star at the end you get a green card but instead people go oh it's complicated and I said oh my gosh this is the summary if I unfolded this it would take the entire room to tell you each step so I've made this one for you these are you know does it confuse you imagine being 14 and without a lawyer asylum how does a child articulate their membership in a particular social group do we have clear published case law no you can file for asylum on your own right it's a 12 page form has to be filed in English must have corroboration in many cases maybe you have a claim of past persecution you know how to establish the nexus requirement we have you know I'm just going through to explain that this is a complicated ecosystem and political rhetoric and rapid decision making without understanding all the interacting moving pieces will lead to more bad agitication models where is Steve Lekomsky he's my mentor he wrote one of the best articles ever called forum choices and he wrote about the values of good agitication I'm paraphrasing some of this work later in the written article I will cite you extensively but what do we want in a good system we want fairness accuracy and we want efficiency because we don't want to have delay to become an incentive for abuse of a system will our design generate false positives as Mr. Sessions appears to have said I actually didn't listen to the testimony he was calling lawyers who are seeking asylum for people dirty lawyers maybe there are fraudulent disrespectful lawyers but there's a lot of people who are making new law by representing children when there's no there's no published case law really about children's claims but if we don't design a system well will we fault will we incentivize poor applications so here's the difference lawyers can make whatever system we're going to use I think we need lawyers in it this is just New York data over a 10-year period 13-year period 86.3% of the cases where a child was represented got some kind of positive result might have been a closure of the case it might have been ultimately some relief granted by the court after visiting all those other places that I talked about and without an attorney only 15% of the time was the child able to get the case even closed or moved or anything good to happen so that's about six times the difference right if you have an attorney you're six times more likely to get this positive result and this pattern is largely the same in all the other courts so when you have that kind of huge dramatic difference what I'm basically saying is whatever system we design and because children are children we should have appointed counsel just a few more examples in absentia is an order of removal where you didn't show up to court and we don't keep children in detention hopefully in excess of long periods as you heard like Mr. Laura because of a 20-year-old settlement called floras we the government is forced to release children to the least restrictive environment however Mr. Trump is called for congress to abrogate that 20-year-old settlement and to say that children can be detained indefinitely well he might be doing that because he doesn't want to have in absential orders but if you're represented it's a very small percentage of lawyers who lose their clients or clients who stop cooperating with their lawyers so again huge percentage of children who don't come to court who get an order it's probably because they didn't know they qualified for all those different potential forms of relief they never got to talk to a lawyer never understood their rights just were afraid or took bad advice from the community of why would you go to court they're just going to deport you and again there's more data that I have over and over again the representation impact is enormous when process interferes with the adjudication of substantive protection when there are no lawyers it's as if substantive protection just disappear so what do I recommend well we need to sit down calmly look at the data share the data analyze the reasons children are coming analyze the different types of children that are coming and we need to design a form of adjudication at that matters along with representation we need to avoid backlogs I agree with that particularly because children they have a disproportionate psychological social economic impact when they're in instable situations there's a lot of sociological evidence that when they have uncertainty about the stability of their environment it causes lifelong damage and trauma but we also want accuracy we don't want ice raids or arrests at the border or border patrol officers in the middle of the desert looking at a kid maybe not even speaking their language many of the children coming from Central America are indigenous speakers their Spanish is their second or even third language and we want a forum that's appropriate for a child communicating and for the context of a child opening up we of course want it to be a judicious program whether it doesn't have to be a judge perhaps making all the adjudications but we want someone who's neutral ultimately we need an opportunity to be heard we need a mechanism that grinds out to make sure we're getting accurate decisions and usually that means we need review another thesis that Steve Lekomsky has proved over and over again the value of judicial review the value of administrative review has this interactive effect of improving adjudication and improving performance within the entire adjudication model what the government is proposing now there would be no transparency and no review either administrative or judicial when you are a border patrol officer or an ICE officer and even if you're well-meaning if no one's going to look at your nature of your adjudications or how you're making them we will not know if there's false negatives or false positives or even who's what's happening to who because it will simply be out of our eyes out of our mind and that's not the best way for American justice to operate so I hope everyone in the room is going to think about gee, six times more likely for a child to get relief if I step forward I hope you will that's it, thank you as Peter mentioned I'm here with the Department of Justice's Executive Office of Immigration Review EOR, which operates the immigration courts before I get into my speech I wanted to particularly thank Peter for bringing me here today so Peter when I was working my way up in academia and policy positions Peter was a wonderfully supportive and generous colleague and it's a reason why I came here today at Rhode Island and worked through the relatively extensive permissions process to speak here and I should say too Peter is really brought together here some of the leading lights in the immigration law field and not all of you may know this but some of the professors in this room I should say some of the other leading lights besides Peter people like Steve Lagombsky like Mary Ellen Fullerton like Peter Shuck like Lenny Benson these are the people that write the textbooks that I'm sure are used here to teach immigration law that have written some of the foundational articles in the field at a time when law schools were not as interested as today in teaching immigration law and holding symposia like this and these were people when I came into this field that I really looked up to and I know a lot of us did so it is a real I think I'm speaking here more in my personal capacity but it is a real pleasure for me to be here today and I think Peter deserves a lot of credit for how this came together so although I am the only government representative here today I think I am not authorized to speak for the entire government on all these issues I am authorized to speak today about asylum fraud and E.R.'s fraud and abuse prevention program which I supervise in Washington DC in the program investigates both fraud by immigrants and fraud against immigrants and I'll talk a little bit about those later so first asylum fraud what is asylum fraud when we talk about it asylum as I think you know it's an application for relief to stay here in the country on grounds that you fear persecution if you were to be deported colloquially speaking but asylum adjudications by definition are made on incomplete information most of it happens in another country so fraud has been a program that or been a problem that has been looked at for decades by various government agencies and various reports it can occur in a number of ways the most prominent is when an attorney or a preparer in exchange for money will prepare and file fraudulent documents written statements supporting details about an applicant's asylum claim sometimes with that applicant's knowledge sometimes without that applicant's knowledge so as the EOIR director said this summer application and benefit fraud in immigration proceedings undermines the overall integrity of our immigration law system places unwarranted burdens on taxpayers and puts public safety and national security at risk or as the attorney general said yesterday at my office as this system becomes overloaded with fake claims it cannot deal effectively with just claims there is a report in 2015 that the U.S. Government Accountability Office wrote on asylum fraud and it said asylum decisions can have serious consequences granting asylum to an applicant with a genuine claim protects the asylum from being returned to a country where he or she could be persecuted or has been on the other hand granting asylum to an individual with a fraudulent claim jeopardizes the integrity of the asylum system by enabling the individual to remain in the United States supply for certain federal benefits and pursue a path to citizenship so in that report in 2015 the Government Accountability Office found that U.S.C.S. and EOIR have limited capabilities to detect asylum fraud and recommended that each agency assess fraud risks across the asylum process so that brings us to EOIR's Fraud and Abuse Prevention Program and I'll give a little bit of history and then talk about what it does the history in 2006 Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and the Bush Administration issued a directive to develop a procedure for immigration courts to refer fraud cases for investigation and potential criminal prosecution as a result the fraud program was created the Fraud and Abuse Prevention Council is Brea Burgey she has three major responsibilities by regulation one is to serve as a point of contact relating to concerns about possible fraud upon the immigration courts particularly with respect to matters involving multiple proceedings systemic risks secondly she coordinates with investigative authorities this is Department of Homeland Security Department of Justice other appropriate agencies in identifying and responding to such fraud and third is notifying disciplinary authorities EOIR's disciplinary counsel state bar authorities regarding attorneys or credited representatives that are committing fraud so in practice the fraud program investigates complaints and it takes appropriate actions what does that mean? it means that fraud program personnel work closely with law enforcement authorities and prosecutors on federal and state and local levels to investigate and prosecute fraud we have in Washington DC a team now of depending how you count about four people there's a director there's a lawyer and a half there's now a full-time investigator there are support staff and what they will do is investigate as I mentioned fraud claims by immigrants systemic asylum fraud claims and fraud against immigrants they coordinate with the attorney discipline program and state bar counsel to discipline attorneys they send cease and desist letters and we have provided training to EOIR personnel like immigration judges on identifying and reporting fraud we've now visited 31 of the 59 immigration courts across the country so in getting into the two types of fraud first let's talk about fraud by immigrants a major case recently was called operation fiction writer in New York City and what happened and I believe the indictments were unveiled in 2013 the FBI conducted an undercover investigation into asylum fraud that was perpetrated by a ring of lawyers and law firms and attorneys and interpreters and involved a large number of individuals I believe resulted in criminal charges against 30 defendants eight convictions and over 4,000 applicants that received asylum fraud so what happened was that the FBI informants were wearing wires they videotaped defendants these were asylum applications from China where the applicants were making false claims forced abortion persecution based on Christianity or Faloon Gong and here you would have law firms that prepared false applications they coached clients how to lie the applications would commonly be very similar same facts about Faloon Gong about a forced abortion different names that were cut and pasted certificates to prove an applicant belonged to a church an interpreter from the law firm would come to an interview if the person didn't say it correctly the interpreter would translate something different and they were all charged and many of them were convicted although not all so what the fraud program did with that is assisted the investigation and they still do this with federal and state offices across the country we work with ICE homeland security investigations they also prosecute child trafficking we often see these issues are related or perpetrated by the same people and we work with U.S. attorneys offices across the country to prosecute things like that secondly the fraud and abuse prevention program investigates fraud against immigrants this is often by lawyers or people pretending to be lawyers notarios is the common term and these are scams against immigrants in the unauthorized practice of law the two are often linked notarios often submit frivolous or fraudulent applications and this is often without the clients knowing but paying a lot of money for the service and often to their detriment it's a widespread problem these unauthorized practitioners will routinely misrepresent their qualifications to individuals most of whom are immigrants who don't speak English who are not familiar with the legal system who might not understand the qualifications necessary to practice and what this means is that thousands of immigrants are defrauded every year and you have a glut of fraudulent applications being filed with the system which clog the system and impact the integrity of the process and I'll mention one example that happened in Rhode Island recently in July 11th actually 2017 Naiman Naifeng was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison he pled guilty to seven counts of mail fraud and two counts of visa fraud after being indicted in January 2016 seven counts of mail fraud eight counts of visa fraud ten counts of identity theft and one count of money laundering what happened is that he was indicted for a pretty common scam in which he promised immigrants access to a work permit to employment authorization but what the immigrants didn't know is that he filed for asylum on their behalf without them knowing so what that meant is that when you file an asylum application if it's not adjudicated within six months which is pretty common you would get a work authorization he charged about 1500 and 2500 per applicant for this he advertised the scam on flyers and local businesses on the internet but what these people didn't know in that they didn't know their filing asylum application is once that application is denied they are put into removal proceedings this is not always to their benefit there are some variations of this there's something called a 10-year green card scam and it's a little similar and that someone will say oh if you've been in the country for 10 years you can get a green card what that really means is that someone will file an asylum application the asylum application is denied you are then referred into immigration court there are some situations in which you can get status and get a green card if you qualify for what's known as cancellation of removal under under extreme and exceptionally unusual hardship which is very hard to meet if you don't meet that you are deported many people don't know that when they're paying their money over there are recently other scams that we're seeing one in New York was a lawyer or I'm sorry a representative Carlos Davila he had created a ID for ice card which he sold for $200 which he said in some in substance oh when ice comes for you just show them the card and he printed it up in the back of his office in the Bronx so what happened is that after a news article was published in the New York City media our office de-accredited him from representing people the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs then investigated him and is seeking $1.3 million in fines from him and these are the kind of actions that are the organizations that we work with across the country particularly with notarios we work with state and locals even more so than the federal government because there is no federal statute for unauthorized practice of law but certain states have updated their laws recently to account for this certain local attorney general's offices or DA's have really made an emphasis on this and one of the key things our program does is working with them to refer information over to them so they can take action so in conclusion I know I talked with a few people here over the course of the conference about things like this happening in Rhode Island I would love to put you in touch with the people in my program you can absolutely email me and I'm happy to put you in touch and talk about this and I'll just leave it there all right thanks very much any remarks from our panelists I just forgot to give my numbers on Rhode Island's children which I looked up you can go to the office of refugee resettlement and they published data by state and so unaccompanied minors apprehended and then taken into the custody of the federal government there were 877 children released to Rhode Island in the past four years in Massachusetts it was 4657 those two numbers they seem quite high especially in a state like Rhode Island your population is not as big but you don't even make the top 15 states so sorry maybe that's good but it does mean just so you know that this is not just people often visualize this problem as a Texas problem or an Arizona problem New York is the fourth largest recipient of unaccompanied children because their family members are residing in the United States and so when they're released that's where they're coming from Can I add something? Mark I asked you this yesterday about it seems we're on the right for right now and hopefully we eternity sessions actually I was listening to this I'm fully on board with the idea of prosecuting asylum fraud and prosecuting the people who are taking advantage of immigrants who are pretty much for a lot of them placing them in removal proceedings without any form of relief available to them but the one question or concern that I have is the Department of Justice is not using the same energy and the same type of resources to actually help the victims who are actually placed in this precarious situation for example somebody who had no idea was applying for asylum and who eventually ended up being placed into deportation proceedings it is my understanding that the Department of Justice as a law enforcement agency is able to issue what it's called a UBSA certification and that might be something that the Department of Justice can do in order to not only prosecute the people who are committing un-taking advantage of immigrants but actually helping out the immigrants for victims of these crimes That's where the alteration ends The New York State Human Rights Commission will take into consideration the victimization and they will issue a new certification I think our problem is the victim of crime certification has been so successful as part of community policing and part of protecting immigrants and victims of domestic violence etc that we have a huge backlog in the applications so we really need Congress to look more closely and carefully and make the availability of that protection proportionate to the size of our population And Shobha, you were fabulous I'm still here I have another question for Mark This is about the issue that Lenny raised which is access to legal representation I know Eur has in the past had a program on providing counsel to immigrants with mental disabilities and I certainly think that's a very badly needed program tough enough for someone who doesn't have a disability to deal with the ins and outs of immigration as Lenny illustrated with her graphics for us particularly difficult for someone who has a mental disability Is that program still going on? And so what's your evaluation of how it's working? Sure, I can offer you a little bit of information on that and then tell you the right people to talk to on the evaluation So the program is still going on it's called the National Quality Representative Program NQRP and it stemmed out of a lawsuit called Franco Gonzalez I believe Franco which is brought in Central District of California one of the California districts and settled and through that program EOIR's Office of Legal Access Programs OLAP I believe I'm not the expert on this some OLAP is I believe they have a contract with Vera Institute that then subcontracts to various providers around the country to provide representation to detainees with mental disabilities and I believe there was a court ruling that was based on the Rehabilitation Act that stemmed this So the program is very much up and running there are the litigation I believe there are like monitoring hearings that are still ongoing that are overseen by that court I'm starting to get beyond my specialization but there are the lawyers down the hall for me to work on this The place to look actually is on EOIR's website which is quite good There is a page there Office of Legal Access Programs and I'm happy to talk more about the folks like the director there and well Steve Lang and also I don't know if you remember Amelia Wilson from New York who's working there now are very committed to that program But that said there's a schizophrenic man who's about to have his final merits hearing because OLAP doesn't yet have it subcontracted out to cover him in Batavia and so we were desperately running around trying to throw a pro bono council I think we finally did I think NYFA finally was able to do it but it's a beautiful idea and it did take litigation so some of you may be saying well why not children why didn't we litigate that I didn't cover it in my presentation The Ninth Circuit said that Congress had structured the judicial review or the judicial challenge that the only way a child can say it as a matter of due process I'm entitled to a free lawyer is to go to your immigration hearing ask for a lawyer go to your BIA appeal and ask for a lawyer file a petition for review and ask for a lawyer right we can do all that right okay and so basically that the case was seen as not judicially presented in the right forum so we don't have litigation yet that similarly forces the federal government to provide lawyer children to work lawyers to children If I can add something to that I know that we're running out of time I was actually one of the first Franco attorneys and I only mentioned this because the U.S. government is only obligated to provide attorneys for people with mental illnesses in certain districts in Southern California Arizona and Nevada because the class members of the lawsuit belong to those districts but the U.S. government at some point decided that they needed to provide counsel for the rest of the country because they said they're gonna sue us again However, seven years later we're still here today and the program hasn't been fully established in the country and I'm afraid that that might be one of the programs that it's gonna get cut off during this administration Thank you and thank you to all the panelists for such interesting and concise presentations I have a particular question to pose to Lenny and I really loved your thought about design and I'm sure that in your more elaborate articles you'll address this at great length but I wondered if you could offer us any thoughts right now about how other systems in the world deal with unaccompanied children because it's a problem everywhere in terms of forced migration and many other countries aren't hobbled by the common law adversarial model that we are very much attracted to so kind of any thoughts or insights you have from looking elsewhere? Right, so again I'm assuming the question you're asking me is children who actually get to the border of a nation so just like they've crossed that border out of Hungary right and they've managed to get somewhere and they're asking for help so unfortunately I have been working on a book for several years with Mary Crock of Sydney, Australia it should be coming out in January from Elgar Cross and there are 25 articles talking about around the world's treatment of unaccompanied minors. Some nations I think Canada is probably so far the best in that they do have a pretty robust legal aid system of appointing counsel for children and you go to their equivalent of an asylum office you don't have this adversarial hearing in Britain they've used complementary protection where they basically have allowed mostly Afghani boys and some others who've managed to reach British shores just a temporary status until they're 18 and then is putting it off to another day. So Kids in Native Defense which is a nationwide organization that does a lot of juvenile justice work for immigrants has opened an office in London because there are 65,000 young people who have turned 18 who now need counsel to try to make article 8 arguments which is under the International Human Rights Convention that they cannot be returned even if they didn't have an asylum claim because their entire life now is in Britain. I'm not giving you a really good solution yet, am I? Right. So basically I think that Australia has dealt with it by interdicting all the ships and not accepting any children. Really, whatever the system is it's going to have to be adaptive to flows and to patterns and it's going to have to have advocates ingrained into the system because of course competency issues trauma-informed interviewing and then an adjudication model that will be transparent and fair. I think it would be answer some of the national security concerns and also some of the concern of children's well-being and the trafficking concerns as well as developing a body of guidelines and law to adjudicate children's claims that are more robust. And if you know of a country where you love how they do it please tell me. Any questions? I'm just going to say you're going to like I was hoping to have when we actually sort of answered the question about sort of the intersectionality between the law and the original law and also the question I think Lenny that you asked as well about the rule of danger based on unaccompanied minors or undocumented minors and just talking about when you're sort of on the ground with family folks where you're seeing the intersection and how you're kind of on the point that you work. Right really quickly because I'm going to have a lot of time but thank you for the question. One of the grounds for people to be put into deportation proceedings is to have committed a criminal offense here in the U.S. So it doesn't matter whether you have legal status here in the U.S. for example where you have a green card you can be placed into removal proceedings if you have committed certain criminal offenses. Now here's the tricky thing about another thing that is so horrible about our immigration system it does not matter how old your conviction is for example you could have committed an offense 20 years ago have served your sentence have paid your debt to society have reintegrated into the community 20 days 20 years later ICE officers come and knock it on your door and say you are the portable sir. So that's how the system is designed there's no such a thing as a statute of limitations on our immigration provisions on that matter. The other thing that is really shocking is the fact that we think about criminal offenses and the first thing that comes to mind is very serious criminal offenses but the truth is that for example in New York state somebody can be considered to be deportable meaning the person can be removed from the U.S. only by having for example not paid the train fare twice if they didn't pay to get into the matter to get into the train twice and they were convicted of what it's called theft of services that has been considered and has been already decided by the courts to be what it's called a conviction involving moral torpitude and because of that the person is deportable. So think about this somebody who has been in the U.S. for 20, 30, 40 years who happens to be poor at some point gets into the train without paying for their fare convicted of theft of services one convicted of theft of services twice and that person is deportable from the U.S. So when we talk about representing people who have criminal convictions we have to be very careful about the type of people that we're thinking we're representing or the type of people that we're thinking that we're talking about because it's all over the spectrum. People who have actually serious criminal convictions and people who don't have serious criminal convictions people who have left their criminal justice system maybe yesterday but also people who have left their criminal justice system years ago. As an attorney who represents people with criminal convictions one of the first things that I have to do and my colleagues have to do all the time is to fight this ideas right that a criminal offense for example makes a person bad right and that criminal offense defines a person and daily what I have to try to build are narratives around the humanity of my clients and how much more there is to my clients than the one mistake that they made 20, 30 years ago. And you're talking to the people that are in the United States put in removal every day permanent residents travel thinking it's fine to go to their grandfather's funeral or go on an airplane trip and they come back and the databases show that they were convicted 15 years ago of two types of shoplifting. I had a client one of chewing gum and one of shaving cream. He was going through a divorce he was distraught he went into counseling he paid his $25 fine he was removable from the United States having come to this country when he was seven. The question about gangs and children there is a there is a direct correlation between school suspension and somehow that information getting into the hands of DHS Department of Homeland Security and ICE particularly in Orange County, California and in Long Island, New York. We don't know those that should be confidential under the federal privacy rights for the students. We don't know how this is happening it sometimes it could be school security officers perhaps working with a gang task force and we seem to see this is a troublemaker in school if we allege they're a gang there's often these things are unsubstantiated then ICE is re-arresting young people who were already in removal already in the process of securing relief some had already been waiting for their green card just to come in the mail and so now they're doing notice of intention to revoke it's all based on allegation because when you're seeking an immigrant visa whether it's inside the United States or outside you can also be precluded from that visa based on admissions of the elements of a crime not a conviction. So this is a very powerful law immigration law and it is robustly enforced and you know just today someone was saying oh I really miss Obama we were talking about Trump and I said yeah the 3.2 million people removed under the Obama administration I think the Obama administration had a philosophy we can show we're in control of the borders we can show we're vigorously enforcing we can work for a congressional reform Congress was unwilling to engage in that dialogue or at least parts of Congress so we really need talk about forum choices again and ideal solutions it's not just going to be in the courts or in defense or in the agencies it also needs Congress to partner with us and to look at reality and to think of better solutions for our communities. Thanks for a bunch. Thank you people.