Kangaroo Court Report #6 - You should see medical staff about that hand
An ethnic cleansing program requires all those involved to leave their humanity at the door.
MINNEAPOLIS – An ethnic cleansing program requires all those involved to leave their humanity at the door, and nothing showcases that more than what happened in a Minnesota immigration courtroom on Tuesday.
Most immigration detainee hearings at the Henry Whipple Federal Building at Ft. Snelling are treated like an assembly line, where each person is assigned a spot, either to be deported or to beg for the chance to live in the country.
The same lines are repeated over and over.
“You have a right to a lawyer but one will not be provided by the government."
"The lawyers you do find are busy."
"The lawyers might not take the case."
"You need to prove why you’re not a threat in order to be released on bond.”
And perhaps the most oft repeated line by immigration judges:
"I don’t have that authority."
And that’s because they don’t have any authority. They were assigned their position by whoever happened to the U.S. Attorney General at the time and can, apparently, be removed for whatever reason the executive branch decides.
Perhaps that’s why, after a man told Immigration Judge Sarah Mazzie that he had not received actual treatment for his broken hand after he was kidnapped by ICE a month ago, she advised him to seek medical help at the Sherburne County jail where he was being held.
The man said that he had a bone sticking out of his palm due to the violent nature of his arrest and the most an immigration judge could do, was to throw up her hands and say, “Welp, maybe see a doctor.”
Instead of fighting his case or finding a lawyer, the man decided to just be deported so that he could seek medical attention.
In fact, a lot of people who come through these immigration offices choose deportation because of how difficult, either through malice or incompetence, the Department of Homeland Security makes it.
For example, DHS lawyer Joseph Dietz forgot to upload a document in a man’s case this week, which showed he entered the country through a port of entry, which is a legal entry point into a country.
Dietz is a petite man who wears ill-fitting suits, thick black glasses and sports a badly groomed mustache and goatee reminiscent of a down-on-their-luck 17th century Musketeer.
He often sits meekly at his computer like most of the other DHS lawyers. His style is something I like to call “Craft beer Nazi."
Whatever you are picturing in your head is correct.
Another example of how badly run DHS is at this point, is that Mazzie, appointed by former Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2017, refused to listen to an attorney that said he was taken off of his case without warning and had not received a notice to appear.
Mazzie replied that a document had been uploaded in the case, which the man did not have access to at the time, that said he had been served.
She refused to listen to anything else the attorney said about the issue. Instead, she raised her voice and basically told him he needed to prepare for his client’s next hearing.
She also refused to listen to a lawyer who said his client’s stop by ICE was unconstitutional. It was not within her authority to do something about it. That was for a federal (real) judge to decide, she told the attorney.
Mazzie likes to have control in her office. At one point she stopped talking and stared at two observers who were whispering in her court. At another, she yelled at a woman to get out of her office after the woman tried to come in to observe.
She served as an assistant chief counsel for the Office of Chief Counsel for ICE at Ft. Snelling from 2014 to 2017. Perhaps that explains why she has been able to hold onto her job for so long compared to some of her other, more moral, former coworkers who have been fired.
Maybe she’s tired of the job though, which is why her LinkedIn profile says she’s #opentowork.
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