A Right to Attorney: NYC Looks at a Possible Fix for the Immigration Court Crisis
The Huffington Post - November 18, 2013, by Nick Malinowski - Everyone in the United States has the right to an attorney in criminal court. The same is not true in immigration deportation...
The Huffington Post - November 18, 2013, by Nick Malinowski - Everyone in the United States has the right to an attorney in criminal court. The same is not true in immigration deportation proceedings -- which are administrative in nature, rather than criminal. This strange gap in the law leaves hundreds of thousands of people on their own to defend against removal by the Department of Homeland Security, a complex and confusing legal procedure frequently conducted in a language the respondents do not understand.
Noncitizens convicted of crimes often face consequences more severe than those demanded by the criminal penalties associated with their charge. A misdemeanor conviction for shoplifting, though unlikely to prompt incarceration, can nevertheless trigger mandatory deportation: dividing families, disrupting communities and preventing people otherwise eligible from seeking asylum. This result is especially troubling in cases where the person may be persecuted or killed for religious or political reasons in their country of origin. Like undocumented immigrants, legal permanent residents are similarly at risk of deportation through this process.
The Vera Institute recently analyzed the 71,767 cases lodged in New York State Immigration Courts between October 2005 and July 2010. They found that 60 percent of detained immigrants did not have an attorney by the time their case was completed. Among the barriers to finding representation are prohibitive costs, high bail rates -- often around $10,000 even for minor offenses -- and the transfer of detainees to far-away locales such as Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania. Within the studied cases, positive outcomes -- relief or termination -- were reached just 3 percent of the time for detainees without representation.
Unfortunately, those able to retain an attorney are not always better off. A survey of 31 of the 33 judges who preside over deportation hearings in New York, described a poor track record by the immigrant defense bar. Immigrants received "inadequate" legal assistance in 33 percent of the cases studied and "grossly inadequate" assistance in 14 percent of the cases. The vast majority of representation in immigration proceedings in New York (91 percent) is provided by private attorneys. While some obviously provide excellent services, as a class, these attorneys offered the worst representation in this forum when compared to non-profit organizations, pro bono attorneys and even law students.
The immigration representation crisis has gained traction and visibility during the past decade as increasingly harsh immigration laws, along with more intense enforcement, have resulted in a stunning increase in the number of people detained and deported for minor crimes. In 2012 alone, DHS deported 410,000 immigrants.
It is a common misconception that people deported via the criminal justice system are dangerous. When it was launched, Secure Communities -- the federal program linking local law enforcement records to ICE databases -- was advertised as prioritizing the removal of "the most dangerous and violent offenders." Yet nearly 75 percent of people deported under "S-Comm" have not been accused of major crimes. Twenty-six percent actually had no criminal charges at all.
Overall, Secure Communities has led to more harm than safety, according to Families for Freedom, part of the statewide coalition New York State Working Group Against Deportation. The program destroys police-community relationships, perverts notions of due process and justice through disparate treatment of immigrants during legal proceedings, and encourages racial and ethnic profiling, the group says.
Meanwhile the well-documented racial disproportionalities of the criminal legal system are apparent in these cases as well. Spanish speaking residents represent 74 percent of immigrants facing deportation hearings in New York City, despite this group making up closer to 40 percent of the entire undocumented population in the city.
All of this comes at an astonishing cost for taxpayers. The so-called "bed mandate" -- an eleventh-hour add-on to the 2009 Homeland Security spending bill that requires Immigration and Customs Enforcement to keep a minimum of 34,000 undocumented immigrants locked-up at all times, regardless of the crimes alleged to have been committed, costs $2 billion a year. Clearly, private prison companies, which house almost two-thirds of ICE's detainees, are benefiting, with just two -- Corrections Corp. and Geo Group -- collecting nearly $500 million in ICE contracts alone during 2012. Who else benefits from these practices?
As a 2008 New York Times editorial described: "A nation of immigrants is holding another nation of immigrants in bondage, exploiting its labor while ignoring its suffering, condemning its lawlessness while sealing off a path to living lawfully."
The New York City Council has approved a $500,000 grant for local public defender agencies -- Brooklyn Defender Services and The Bronx Defenders -- to begin providing representation to indigent people in immigration proceedings, the first program of its kind in the country. This is perhaps a first step toward creating a system within the immigration courts that is fair and just -- an impossible description for the current state characterized most dominantly by poor legal representation, when attorneys are available at all.
However, the project will assist just 190 people during the first year, and there is no guarantee the funding will be continued past 2014. While the program will likely help these represented immigrants, it seeks to provide attorneys to only a small number of those who might otherwise qualify for assistance. It would cost $7 million a year to provide legal counsel for every indigent deportation case, a small amount considering the annual Department of Corrections budget of $1.08 billion.
Source:
NYC Youth, Council Members Call on City to Address Bullying and Conflict in Schools by Increasing Social and Mental Health Support, not Policing
10.30.2017
...
10.30.2017
Onyx Walker, Youth Leader from Urban Youth Collaborative alongside Council Members Daniel Dromm and Mark Levine at the steps of City Hall before the NYC Council hearing on bullying to demand social and mental health support for NYC public schools, not policing.New York, NY - On Monday, October 30th, young people from the Urban Youth Collaborative, along with NYC Council Chair of Education Committee Daniel Dromm, Council Member Mark Levine, and organizations -- including Dignity in School Campaign New York and the Center for Popular Democracy--held a press conference in front of City Hall to call on New York City to address bullying and conflict in schools by increasing social, emotional, and mental health supports, not policing and punitive zero tolerance policies. The young people are calling for drastically increasing the number of guidance counselors, restorative practices and mental health supports in schools.
The press conference coincided with the release of a new report, “Young People’s Vision for Safe, Supportive, and Inclusive Schools,” written by the Center for Popular Democracy and Urban Youth Collaborative, whose organizational members include young people from Future of Tomorrow, Make the Road New York, Sistas and Brothas United. The report recommendations were developed by youth leaders who have spent years organizing to transform their schools and their communities. In response to calls to return to discriminatory and ineffective school climate strategies, young people are advancing solutions that reimagine school safety and reduce bullying and discrimination by prioritizing and allocating funding for meeting their social, emotional, and mental health needs. Study after study shows policing and exclusionary discipline does not create safer schools, and in fact, can make students feel less safe and harm our most vulnerable students. In contrast, the supports students are calling for reduce bullying and create safer schools. Immediately following the press conference there was a a New York City Council hearing on Bullying, Discrimination, and Harassment in Schools.
Young people are uniquely situated to lead the dialogue in developing truly safe and inclusive learning communities. The blueprint highlights key priorities for all NYC schools, including: increasing the number of trained and supervised full time guidance counselors and social workers; implementation of restorative justice practice in all underserved schools and; comprehensive mental supports for young people. Young people are at the forefront of a growing movement to demand New York City divest from ineffective, costly and racially discriminatory policing practices – and instead invest in creating schools that respond to student needs and create truly safe and inclusive schools. .
"Too often, I have seen a lack of support for students, myself included, because there is a lack of guidance counselors in schools. On average there is one full time guidance counselor for every 407 students. We need to significantly increase the number of guidance counselors. By having one guidance counselor for every 100 students, a counselor’s workload will not only lessen, but the depth of the relationships they have with students will deepen" said Maybelen Navarro, Youth Leader, Urban Youth Collaborative.
“We don’t have to look very far to develop solutions that create safe and inclusive school communities. Time and time again we are reminded that young people are the best resource we have for developing successful and sustainable policies for every school in every neighborhood.” said Roberto Cabanas the Coordinator for the Urban Youth Collaborative. “Today we release this Policy Brief to share young people’s vision for their schools. We need more counselors, restorative practices, and mental health care.”
“The city must be bold enough to reimagine safety so that it is rooted in effective and humane practices of support rather than policing” said Kate Terenzi, Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Center for Popular Democracy. “Young people hold the answer to how to create inclusive and safe schools. Their solutions - guidance counselors, mental health services, and restorative justice - are proven effective by research and young people’s own expertise in navigating school environments. Placing more police and metal detectors won’t make school safer, social and mental health support will do that. ”
"It is imperative that we bolster social, emotional, and mental health support structures in NYC public schools," said NYC Council Education Committee Chairperson Daniel Dromm. "Metal detectors, increased policing and zero tolerance policies do nothing for the thousands of children affected by bullying year-round. These measures only contribute to the problem, creating hostile school climates that are not conducive to learning. To effectively push back against bullying, we must increase the number of school guidance counselors, employ restorative justice practices and offer comprehensive mental health services across the five boroughs. As Chairperson of the NYC Council Education Committee, I am committed to doing all that I can to end school bullying by moving our schools in this direction"
In addition, the report calls the city to reverse policies that have proven ineffective at creating safe and supportive environments for students policies that promote the exclusion and criminalization of Students. In particular, New York City should end arrests, as well as the issuance of summonses and juvenile reports, in schools for non-criminal violations and misdemeanors; institute a moratorium on the installation of new metal detectors in schools, and remove existing metal detectors; and, remove police officers from schools.
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PHOTOS: LINK
LIVESTREAM VIDEO: LINK
TESTIMONIES: Young People’s and the Center for Popular Democracy’s
Contact: Roberto Cabanas, Urban Youth Collaborative 973.432.2406 or Roberto.Urbanyouthcollab@gmail.com
www.urbanyouthcollaborative.org
The Urban Youth Collaborative is led by students young people and brings together New York City students to fight for real education reform that puts students first. Demanding a high-quality education for all students, young people struggle for social, economic, and racial justice in the city’s schools and communities. Organizational members include: Make the Road New York, Sistas and Brothas United, and Future of Tomorrow
www.populardemocracy.org
Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda
Group Blasts Fed for Lack of Diversity in Leadership
Source: Wall Street Journal
Federal Reserve leadership is overly...
Source: Wall Street Journal
Federal Reserve leadership is overly male, almost entirely white and drawn too frequently from the banking community, according to a group critical of the central bank.
A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign analyzes the types of people populating the Fed’s Washington-based board of governors, the regional bank presidencies and the regional bank boards of directors.
The report notes that all voting members of the central bank’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee and nearly all the regional bank presidents are white. Just two of the 12 presidents and two of the five governors are women.
“These key decision-making bodies remain dramatically unbalanced and unrepresentative of the vast majority of people who participate in the economy,” said the group, which has called for more public input into the selection of regional bank presidents and their performance evaluations.
The center said the composition of the Fed’s leadership bodies violates the spirit of the law that created the central bank, which calls for membership drawn from many different industries and interests.
A Fed spokesman responded to the criticism about the regional bank boards by saying the central bank has “focused considerable attention” to finding directors “with diverse backgrounds and experiences” that represent agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers, as the law requires.
“We also are striving to increase ethnic and gender diversity,” the spokesman said, noting a rise in minority representation on the boards from 16% in 2010 to 24% today. Female representation has risen from 23% to 30% over the same period, and all told, 46% of regional directors now are either a woman or a member of a racial minority, the spokesman added.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen is the central bank’s first female leader.
The Fed Up group, with a membership drawing heavily from labor unions and community organizations, is a regular critic of the central bank. It has argued in recent months that the Fed shouldn’t raise short-term interest rates and has pressed its case in private meetings with Fed officials. Several of its members appeared outside the central bank’s research conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last year to call attention to their views.
The group’s concern about a dearth of diversity at the Fed has been echoed by former Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota. He argued in a blog post last month the central bank has appeared to give short shrift to racial concerns in part because there have been almost no African-Americans in its policy-making ranks. He wrote that the concerns of racial minorities have been “underemphasized” at the Fed.
The last African-American to serve on the Fed board was Roger W. Ferguson Jr., who served as a governor between 1997 and 2006 and as vice chairman from 1999 to 2006. The first African-American to serve as a Fed governor was Andrew Brimmer, from 1966 to 1974.
The report showed particular concern about the directors on the regional Fed bank boards, which are drawn from the private sector. It said 83% are white, compared with around two-thirds of the total U.S. population.
“The diversity of regional board members is meant to inform the bank presidents, who in turn, participate in discussions and vote at the FOMC,” the report said. “However, the boards, the presidents, and the FOMC fail to represent their region’s racial diversity.”
The report also said its analysis found that representatives of banking and what it calls commercial interests have increased their share of regional Fed board seats in recent years. Representatives of community groups and labor unions account for fewer than 5% of the available board seats, according to the center.
Among the regional Fed bank boards’ most high-profile roles is selecting their bank presidents. Recent regulatory changes now bar directors from participating in that process if their firms are regulated by the bank.
The directors also provide information to bank officials about local economic conditions and give advice on running the banks.
Seattle Scales Back Tax in Face of Amazon’s Revolt, but Tensions Linger
Seattle Scales Back Tax in Face of Amazon’s Revolt, but Tensions Linger
Ms. Kniech was one of more than 50 local lawmakers in the United States who sent an open letter to Seattle leaders and residents on Monday supporting the tax and criticizing Amazon’s resistance to...
Ms. Kniech was one of more than 50 local lawmakers in the United States who sent an open letter to Seattle leaders and residents on Monday supporting the tax and criticizing Amazon’s resistance to it. “By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a message to all of our cities: we play by our own rules,” the letter said.
Read the full article here.
Arpaio Meets Virtually No DOJ Criteria for a Pardon
Arpaio Meets Virtually No DOJ Criteria for a Pardon
President Donald Trump’s unorthodox, dysfunctional behavior and decision-making may lead him to violate a whole slew of new norms if he announces a pardon Tuesday night, as he has said he might,...
President Donald Trump’s unorthodox, dysfunctional behavior and decision-making may lead him to violate a whole slew of new norms if he announces a pardon Tuesday night, as he has said he might, for former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Legal analysts and Dept. of Justice guidelines reviewed by TYT suggest that granting a presidential pardon to the controversial former sheriff would go against virtually every recommended criteria the DOJ has for appropriate pardon candidates.
Read the full article here.
What Does Jeff Flake's Vote Mean? Brett Kavanaugh Is Still in the Running, For Now
What Does Jeff Flake's Vote Mean? Brett Kavanaugh Is Still in the Running, For Now
If you were tuned into the Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday afternoon, you may have witnessed a confusing moment: Hours after Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, announced in a...
If you were tuned into the Judiciary Committee hearing on Friday afternoon, you may have witnessed a confusing moment: Hours after Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, announced in a statement that he would vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, he showed up late to the vote and then asked for a delay on the Senate floor vote, pending an FBI investigation. A quick vote along the roll call occurred...and then the hearing was abruptly adjourned.
Read the full article here.
Starbucks vows to do more to ease barista schedules
An internal memo from a Starbucks executive this week urged store managers to "go the extra mile" to improve workers' schedules.
The letter was distributed on...
An internal memo from a Starbucks executive this week urged store managers to "go the extra mile" to improve workers' schedules.
The letter was distributed on Tuesday and refers to a New York Times story that was set to be published the following day titled, "Starbucks falls short after pledging better labor practices."
The Times story referred to a survey by the nonprofit advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy.
Based on interviews with 200 baristas in 37 states, the survey says Starbucks "is not living up to its commitment to provide predictable, sustainable schedules to its workforce."
In 2014, Starbucks said it was changing its policies telling managers to post schedules at least a week in advance and not make store employees work an opening and closing shift back-to-back.
In this week's memo, Cliff Burrows, Starbucks (SBUX) group president of the U.S. and Americas, said the findings of the new survey "suggest" that neither commitment was being met -- "contrary to the expectations we have in place."
In his letter, Burrows urges managers to improve scheduling for coffee baristas, who the company calls partners.
"To our store managers, I want to stress that as we continue to evolve and improve the usability of our system, we have to go the extra mile to ensure partners have a consistent schedule -- free of back-to-back close and open shifts that are less than 8 hours apart -- that is posted 2 weeks in advance," he wrote.
Source: CNN Money
A Party Within the Democratic Party
A Party Within the Democratic Party
“Organizer Ady Barkan of the Center for Popular Democracy, honored at the summit for his work fighting for health care, acidly noted, “We have a lot of house cleaning to do.””
...
“Organizer Ady Barkan of the Center for Popular Democracy, honored at the summit for his work fighting for health care, acidly noted, “We have a lot of house cleaning to do.””
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Fed official explains why he stopped trying to predict the future
Fed official explains why he stopped trying to predict the future
JACKSON HOLE, WYO. -- The world's economic elite gathered here for an annual symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week to debate the strategies central banks should...
JACKSON HOLE, WYO. -- The world's economic elite gathered here for an annual symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week to debate the strategies central banks should employ to safeguard the global economy. We sat down with St. Louis Fed President James Bullard to chat about when he might be ready for a rate hike, the limits of his powers and why predicting the future is futile.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
Wonkblog: Let’s start with the question of the day: Which month looks good to you for a rate hike?
Bullard: Actually, I’m agnostic on this. Our new framework calls for one, and only one, and then we go on pause for a bit. It’s not critical to me exactly when we make that move, so we wouldn’t have to go at any particular meeting.
I do like to move on good news, so if we have good information, and we’re at a meeting, it might be a good opportunity to go ahead and make that move. But what’s different about what I’m saying is I’ve got a real flat interest rate path — much closer to the markets’ interest rate path. I don’t have this march upward of 200 or 250 basis points.
If only one more rate hike is really needed to get to the Fed’s neutral stance, why does it matter if you move in September, December or next year? You would be willing to wait until 2017?
Certainly, I just don’t feel that there’s any urgency when you’ve got the framework I’m talking about.
[The Federal Reserve is debating how to fight the next recession]
So explain your framework for us.
What we wanted to do is break down this idea that we’re really certain about where the economy is going in the medium- and long-run. What most models do is they have something called a steady state, which is really an average of all the variables in the past: You look at the unemployment rate, and you take the average unemployment rate. You look at interest rates and take the average past interest rate. You look at inflation, growth — you take averages of the past, and you call those your normal values.
As you go along, you expect all your variables to go back to their normal values. That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s the old framework. And what we’re saying is we don’t like that framework anymore because it suggests we have a lot more certainty about where the economy is going than we really do.
These averages of these variables from the past — they can sometimes be high and sometime be low. You can be in a configuration where these things are low, and then you can switch to another configuration when they’re high. Then they’re high for a while, and you switch back to low. What you have to do is make policy given whatever regime you’re in.
We think that the regime that is dominant right now is a slow-growth regime that is characterized by low productivity growth and very low real returns on short-term government debt around the world. We think these regimes are persistent. These things aren’t changing any time soon. And because of that, we just have to take them as given, for now anyway.
Given that in this framework, it’s difficult to tell when the regime is shifted, how do you know that you’re not setting monetary policy for a regime that’s already expired?
You’re gonna know when the regime switches. These very low real rates of return on government debt, if you look at the ex-post return on one-year Treasurys, it’s about -135 basis points right now. If that starts to go up rapidly, we’re gonna know and we’re going to take note of it. We’re gonna say, “Aha! Our regime has changed, and we’re going to have to change monetary policy accordingly.”
But for forecasting purposes, I wouldn’t say that I’m expecting that to happen all of a sudden. It’s been that way for at least the last three years, and if you look at real rates of return, they’ve declined for the last 30 years. It’s also very clear that we’re in a very low productivity environment.
It’s not that you go to sleep. You stay alert to the possibility that the regime can change in the future, and probably will change at some point in the future. It’s just not good to be predicting that it’s going to change.
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen's speech here laid out the argument that the Fed is not out of ammunition to fight the next recession. Do you agree with that?
I loved the speech. She made the case that we still have quite a bit of bandwidth to handle problems if they arise in the next couple of years, and I very much agree with that. But at the same time, it’s always good to be studying other possibilities. I actually have papers on nominal GDP targeting, so I think that’s an interesting topic. It's probably not ready for prime time, but I’m a believer in research.
What led you to the support for this regime-based framework. Can you talk about the evolution of your thinking?
Maybe some frustration with the dot plot. We were saying we were going to have to raise rates fairly aggressively over the forecast horizon in order to keep the economy on track, and that wasn’t materializing. We had that forecast for several years, and it wasn’t really working. For that reason, I wanted to get a different way to think about what we were doing.
We’ve only moved once on the policy rate, and markets are saying maybe one more move this year. That would only be one move per year — that’s really not normalization. If you’re going to say it’s going to take 10 years to get back to a normal value, you’re really saying we’re not going back there. That’s way longer than any sort of business cycle than you can reasonably talk about.
How do you feel about the division between monetary and fiscal policy currently? Do you feel it’s time to pass the baton here?
I do think that. And I think the regime framework is good for laying that out for people. Part of the story is that the recession has been over for seven years. The unemployment rate has gone down below 5 percent. Inflation is low, but we don’t think it’s that low, and it’s kind of coming up to target.
So the cyclical dynamics are all done. The dust has settled, I guess is the way I would put it.
You might say the dust has settled, and I don’t like what I see. But for that, you can’t solve that with monetary policy. You’ve got to have things that are going to increase productivity in the economy. You’ve got to make the economy more efficient. New ideas, better technology, better diffusion of technology, better human capital, better skills match — I think it’s a lot of small things that you have to do right to get an economy humming. The story of let’s keep interest rates low and that will help us, that’s kind of over for now.
Related to that are the demonstrations by Fed Up and the Center for Popular Democracy that were held Thursday. Any additional thoughts on their point of view, that there’s still more that the Fed can do?
I love the people that come here. I think they’re a really great slice of the American workforce. It’s really nice that they’re willing to take time out of their lives to come out here and talk to us boring central bankers.
They want to talk about low nominal interest rates as solving difficult problems of how our labor markets operate and how our labor markets are unfair to many people. I would like them to think about the German labor market reforms that were done over the last decade. Germany had very high unemployment for a long time. It was an endemic problem, and then they did these reforms and got their unemployment rate cut in half — even though Europe went through a double-dip recession during that period.
It showed to me that there are ways to attack these problems, and I think we could do that in the U.S. I think they should refocus their efforts on the labor secretary, so we could get those kinds of reforms going. People aren’t even talking about that.
By Ylan Q. Mui
Source
The Price of Defunding the Police
The Price of Defunding the Police
A new report fleshes out the controversial demand to cut police department budgets and reallocate those funds into healthcare, housing, jobs, and schools. Will that make communities of color safer...
A new report fleshes out the controversial demand to cut police department budgets and reallocate those funds into healthcare, housing, jobs, and schools. Will that make communities of color safer?
Read the full article here.
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