Annual meeting. Resolving change

• Author: Lorelei Laird
• Pages: 64-65

ABA JOURNAL | WINTER 2019–2020

65

ABA Insider | ANNUAL MEETING

ANNUAL MEETING

Resolving

Change

Commission on Immigration

urges widespread reform

BY LORELEI LAIRD

At the ABA House of Del-

egates meeting in San

Francisco in August, Mas-

sachusetts Bar Association

delegate Kevin Curtin asked the dele-

gates to consider the position today’s

asylum-seekers nd themselves in.

“A person comes to our borders,

legitimately seeking asylum from, say,

political or religious persecution,” said

Curtin, a prosecutor for Middlesex

County, Massachusetts. “We then lock

her up. We might separate her from

her children. And then, we prevent her

from having access to counsel. ... We

wouldn’t do that to what my grand-

mother would call common criminals.”

That’s why Curtin was at the podi-

um promoting the ABA Commission

on Immigration’s Resolution 121D.

The resolution asks Congress and the

Department of Homeland Security to

restore a President Barack Obama-era

policy that made it easier for immi-

grants to be released another way. In

the friendly environment that is the

House oor, it passed without debate or

Also, what we have to come to

embrace in a way that we have not cer-

tainly embraced before is the value that

the American Bar Association brings as

the only and unique body that speaks

out with authority and with knowledge

on areas of law that we know are im-

portant to our country and the world.

What we do is something different than

what state and local and some specialty

bars do when we speak out about the

independence of the judiciary, we speak

out about the rule of law, we speak out

notable opposition.

In fact, all six of the policies that the

Commission on Immigration brought to

the 2019 ABA Annual Meeting—Res-

olutions 121A-F—sailed through the

House. And although you’re not likely

to see all of them in headlines, commis-

sion chair Wendy Wayne says they have

an important job. Making them ofcial

ABA policy permits the ABA Govern-

mental Affairs Ofce to start lobbying

for major changes in the immigration

court system aimed at increasing access

to due process, efciency, judicial inde-

pendence and adequate resources.

“These are nonpartisan, core values

for the ABA and the United States jus-

tice system, and they should apply re-

gardless of anyone’s politics,” said Mary

Ryan, who was co-chair of the ABA’s

Working Group on Unaccompanied

Minor Immigrants when she introduced

the resolutions on the House oor.

Making it ocial

The resolutions spring from—and

codify as ABA policy—a report put out

in March by the commission, Reform-

ing the Immigration System. It gives

the ABA’s best recommendations about

how to improve the system for deter-

mining whether an immigrant should

stay in the United States, and it’s an

update to the commission’s 2010 report

of the same name. The newer version

makes several new recommendations,

some of which address the increased po-

liticization of immigration policy. Those

recommendations needed to become

about due process and separation of

powers and other issues that are at the

core of what we do. When one lawyer

speaks out, it can be powerful. When

the ABA speaks out about these issues, I

believe it is impactful.

And one last question, what are

you most excited about?

I think I’m most excited with regard

to the various issues we have talked

about, knowing that the ABA not only

talks and speaks to these issues but has

specic programming, policies, toolkits,

projects, networking opportunities and

more in terms of resources to make sure

that our talking to an issue becomes

action on an issue. That is something

that I think we will be spending a lot

of time on on the road, making sure

that the resources that we have within

our tent—and it’s a very big tent—are

known to individuals, are utilized by

law rms, are made readily available to

law schools and really make a differ-

ence. Q

ABA policy before the organization

could throw its weight behind them.

The resolution that was perhaps

most directly related to current head-

lines was Resolution 121A, which

concerns the power of U.S. attorneys

general to refer immigration cases to

themselves and decide them unilaterally.

“In this administration, it has been

used a lot, and to overrule decades and

decades of case law,” says Wayne, who’s

also director of the immigration impact

unit of Massachusetts’ Committee for

Public Counsel Services, an indigent

defense organization.

Resolution 121A urges the Justice

Department to make formal rules for

how a U.S. attorney general may exer-

cise this power and asks the attorney

general to use it sparingly.

The same power was at issue in

Resolution 121D, the resolution that

Curtin introduced. In April, U.S. At-

torney General William Barr ruled in

Matter of M-S- that immigration judges

may not consider bond requests from

asylum-seekers who’ve established a

credible fear of persecution. The reso-

lution therefore calls on DHS to use its

discretion to release them on human-

itarian grounds, in the way that it did

under Obama, and codify that policy as

a regulation.

Other resolutions in the series were

on quieter issues that were no less

important to reformers. Resolution

121B calls on the federal government

to relax a 30-day deadline for appeals

when the immigrant is representing