A year and a half ago I wrote about a January 26, 2012, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Oshodi v. Holder (Oshodi I). The case presented an intra-circuit split on the issue of when an alien must provide corroborating evidence in an asylum hearing. An earlier Ninth Circuit case, Ren v. Holder, held: Therefore, the IJ must undertake the following sequential analysis. To begin, the IJ must determine whether an applicant’s credible testimony alone meets the applicant’s burden…

Lawyers, like children, complain when things are unfair. Children complain to their parents. Lawyers complain to appellate judges. Parents respond, “Life’s unfair,” which acknowledges the inherent unfairness in life, but does not repair the unfairness. Complaints in the legal world substitute the word “due process” for “fair.” Courts, when dealing with these due process claims, do not acknowledge unfairness and often respond, “What you are complaining about did not violate due process.” Same result. Practitioners before any adjudicative body know…

A remarkable thing a parent learns from raising children is their innate understanding of fairness. There is no toddler indoctrination camp that teaches fairness. Barney, Teletubbies, and Blues Clues don’t teach it. In the olden days, Sesame Street, Zoom, or the Three Stooges (yes, in the olden days, toddlers watched the Stooges) didn’t. Maybe Mister Rogers and Davey and Goliath did, but not enough to completely indoctrinate kids. Split a sandwich, cut a piece of cake, share a can of…

Immigration and Customs Enforcement seems to be under pressure to deport people. There are conflicting reports about the truth of internal memos from the ICE leadership about quotas for deportation. As anyone who has worked in government knows, there are metrics to measure productivity – when I was in the Army, the resource management people were always having us fill out forms about our productivity, and we were the Army, which is not in the business of producing anything. ICE…