A few times I have written about what appeared to me to be an Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy of taking aliens out of the United States without the aliens availing themselves of their right to see an immigration judge by providing false information about the consequences staying and fighting a case as opposed to leaving. I learned of this through speaking to many aliens and family members of aliens who experienced this. This modus operandi was confirmed by a…

Paula Poundstone Paula Poundstone, a comedienne (if you consider “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” funny, which I actually do) pled guilty in September 2001 of a felony charge of child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of inflicting injury on a child. She had originally been arrested for committing lewd acts on a child. Ms. Poundstone maintained her innocence regarding the lewd act charges. The child endangerment and injury on a child charges were supposedly based on driving under the influence…

  One of the worst things about my job is talking to people who have been ripped off by other lawyers. It is bad because it is demoralizing that there are so many miscreants among my peers. Ripping off the rich is one thing, but ripping off poor foreigners is quite another. I remember in law school, my professor for professional responsibility once posed the question of why there are so many lawyer jokes – essentially asking why it seems…

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…