In ACLU victory, federal judge says Trump admin must give asylum seekers parole hearings – By Gabe Ortiz (dailykos.com) / July 2 2018
In a victory for vulnerable families and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a federal judge has ruled “the Trump administration is violating its own policy by uniformly denying parole to asylum-seekers,” including those who passed their initial “credible fear” interviews and don’t pose any danger to public safety:
“To mandate that ICE provide these baseline procedures to those entering our country–individuals who have often fled violence and persecution to seek safety on our shores–is no great judicial leap,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg observed dryly.
Under the Trump administration, Boasberg wrote, “parole rates have plummeted from over 90% to nearly zero” and the Department of Homeland Security has shifted from individually considering whether each asylum-seeker should be granted parole until their hearing to uniformly denying such requests.
“The numbers here are irrefutable,” he notes in his opinion.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of asylum seekers who passed their interviews, but were then denied parole and kept detained. “One plaintiff, Ansly Damus, is a former ethics teacher fleeing political persecution in Haiti, who has been detained without parole for more than a year and a half, despite asylum officers determining he had a credible fear of returning to his home country.”
The ACLU tweeted that the judge has ordered a “case-by-case review of whether each asylum seeker in our class action lawsuit should be released on humanitarian parole”.
