I recently read a New Yorker article  by Adam Gopnik where he started the article and ended the article quoting Alexander Pope. Good article, but why quote a guy I did not even know was Pope? My article will quote someone a little more approachable, Billy Joel. Here goes, “Honesty is such a lonely word / Everyone is so untrue.” Who am I referring to? Our government and its treatment of Middle Eastern asylum seekers. The problem – though the…

The American Civil Liberties Union and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced  that a settlement has been reached in a lawsuit, Alfaro Garcia v. Johnson, filed by the ACLU seeking to compel USCIS to conduct reasonable fear interviews for aliens detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement who are prior deportees who are found in the United States and make Asylum claims. Under the settlement, USCIS will conduct these interviews within ten days of the alien’s being referred to USCIS for such…

The Los Angeles Times reported on March 6 in an article, “7,000 immigrant children ordered deported without going to court,” that, well, 7,000 immigrant children were ordered deported without going to court. The article attributes this this to “notices sometimes arrived late, at the wrong address or not at all. In some cases, children were ordered to appear in a court near where they were initially detained, rather than where they were living.” My experiences with the handling of asylum…

The news is full of stories about how families with children and unaccompanied minors are flooding into the United States from Latin America. It is bad times in Latin America. Families are coming to America fleeing crime, violence, and the impacts of climate change. News reports indicate that people are operating under the misconception that the laws have changed and they are welcome in the United States. Changes in administrative practice may have helped foster that opinion. Some people attribute …