30 March 2004
From: Executive Director, Malcolm Rich
To: Members and Friends of the Chicago Council of Lawyers and the Chicago Appleseed Fund For Justice

In this e-Newsletter:

President's Column
By Diana C. White

In this edition, Chicago Appleseed President, Diana C. White discusses a current joint initiative by Chicago Appleseed and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago:  An Examination of the Chicago Immigration Court’s Video-Teleconferencing Hearings.         

An Examination of the Chicago Immigration Court's Video-Teleconferencing Hearings

We live in an era of rapid technological change -- t.v.’s in the door of the family refrigerator, cell-phones that double as digital cameras, "cookies" that track our progress across the Internet. The gadgets run the gamut from highly useful to ingeniously idiotic; the people who use them run the gamut from high-level multi-taskers to lost-in-space Luddites.

This letter is about one technological advance that may in fact be a giant step backwards: court hearings conducted by video-teleconference, in which immigration judges decides whether aliens in immigration detention will be removed from the United States (often leaving parents, siblings, spouse, and children behind) – VTC hearings in removal cases.

Until recently, VTC hearings were reserved for aliens serving prison sentences in a state correctional facility. Aliens in civil detention were brought to court for their removal hearings. That changed in Chicago in 2002.

Here’s how hearings are conducted in Chicago these days. The immigration judge, a translator, and the trial attorney for BICE (formerly the INS) gather in a courtroom at 55 E. Monroe Street. The alien is brought from the facility where (s)he has been detained (an agency facility or county jail anywhere in the area served by the Chicago immigration judges) to Broadview, a temporary holding facility __ miles west of the City. One video camera is trained on the alien in Broadview and another is trained on one or more of the people in the courtroom on Monroe Street. A television monitor in each location receives the sound and picture feed from the other location. The alien’s attorney can either stay in the courtroom where the judge and opposing counsel are, or travel to Broadview where the client is.

Proceedings in immigration court are conducted in English. But aliens often speak little or no English – their native languages may be Spanish, Mandarin, Lao, Hmong, Swahili, or Urdu. Under the best of circumstances, an alien who does not speak Spanish often does not see the translator, but can only listen over a speaker phone in the downtown Chicago courtroom. Where the alien is not in the courtroom, however, he cannot signal that he did not understand the translator, or that the translation is too fast, or that he was not finished answering a question. The judge cannot see that the alien is confused about what is going on. The amplification is spotty. The sound cuts in and out. Images freeze, or are too small and blurry to be visible.

Because the alien is not in the courtroom, the immigration judge often forgets to pause to let his remarks be translated. If the alien’s attorney is in the courtroom, she must sometimes interrupt the judge (or other speaker) to allow translation to occur. But if she is in the courtroom, then she has no opportunity to confer privately with her client as the hearing goes on.

Imagine what happens if the alien doesn’t have an attorney, but is appearing both remotely and pro se. Or what happens if the immigration judge considers documents or photographs in a case, or if there are other witnesses testifying. Suppose the alien is seeking asylum or relief under the Convention Against Torture, where the alien’s physical condition or credibility are in issue. VTC can turn an obvious human rights violation into a fuzzy and distant image.

Against a background of growing opposition to VTC removal hearings, Chicago Appleseed and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago are working together on a project to document, as concretely as possible, what actually happens when these proceedings are turned into "virtual" hearings. After an initial training by LAF immigration attorneys, students, lawyers, and other volunteers are being sent out to immigration courtrooms and to Broadview to observe removal proceedings from both ends. They will note their observations on standardized reporting sheets, with space for comments. The court-watching sheets will be gathered and analyzed, and the observers debriefed. Finally, the data will be analyzed and published in a joint LAF-Appleseed report. The target date for completing the report is December 2004.

If our concerns prove about VTC removal hearings prove unfounded, we will say so. But if they demonstrate that, in the removal context, a picture is not worth a thousand words, we will say that loud and clear as well. If we have learned anything from watching the first detainees come out of Guantanomo, it is that abstract justifications for procedural shortcuts may not withstand informed and fair-minded scrutiny.

Chicago Appleseed and the Chicago Council of Lawyers Seek Nominations For the Commitment to Justice Award

We are seeking the nomination of an individual, firm, agency, corporation, organization, etc. that has demonstrated a commitment to bringing about an exemplary system of justice that is both effective and fair to all persons.  Please send your suggestion to Malcolm Rich (Phone: 312-988-6552; Fax: 312-654-8644; e-mail:  malcolmrich@chicagoappleseed.org).  Thank you.