America's harshest immigration judge is a Clinton appointed Democrat

[Demovictory9]

Inside the Courtroom Where Every Asylum Seeker Gets Rejected

Over eight years, America’s harshest immigration judge denied more than 200 claims in a row.
In February 2018, in a small courtroom in rural Louisiana, an Eritrean man was fighting an impossible battle. The man, whom I’ll call Abraham—he asked that his real name not be used—was trying to convince immigration judge Agnelis Reese that he should receive asylum in the United States. He told Reese he had been imprisoned for 12 years in Eritrea for refusing to complete his military service, and tortured—not only beaten but sexually assaulted. “What do you mean?” Reese asked.

Abraham, who did not have a lawyer, told Reese he was too ashamed to share what he had been through. She pressed him. “I’m not trying to force you,” she said, according to a transcript of the hearing, “but this type of harm would be important to your case.” With his future at stake, Abraham explained how two Eritrean prison guards had covered his nose with plastic before at least one of them put his penis in Abraham’s mouth, at which point he passed out. “Did they do anything else that was sexual molestation?” Reese asked.

“They also inserted a stick in my bottom,” Abraham said. Reluctantly, he recalled being sodomized at least three times in a bloodstained room “intended for suffering.”

When Abraham mentioned that he was a Pentecostal Christian and that his status as a religious minority had contributed to his mistreatment in Eritrea, Reese pounced. During an initial interview with an American asylum officer, Abraham had not mentioned being sexually assaulted. “When you lied to the asylum officers or failed to disclose your sexual abuse,” Reese asked, “what do you think Jesus thought about that?”

“I did not lie,” Abraham replied.

“If this woman is to hear your case,” one asylum seeker was told, “you are going back home.”
Reese rejected his asylum claim on narrow technical grounds. Abraham had stated, correctly, that the Eritrean government effectively controls the state church. Yet, Reese wrote, he did not produce documentation for this fact. Even if he somehow had been able to satisfy this requirement, Abraham probably never had a chance. Between 2011 and 2018, Reese denied every single one of the more than 200 asylum claims she heard.

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/07/inside-the-courtroom-where-every-asylum-seeker-gets-rejected/

On paper, Reese might seem like someone who would be sympathetic to the challenges facing persecuted minorities: She’s a black woman, a Clinton administration appointee, a registered Democrat, and a preacher. But her unforgiving reputation precedes her. Theodore Tonka, a Cameroonian who sought asylum in 2017, recalls other African asylum seekers telling him to pray he wouldn’t get Reese. “If this woman is to hear your case,” he remembers one saying, “you are going back home.” Tonka started to believe them when an attorney he hoped would represent him said she didn’t want to waste her time with Reese. After the judge rejected his claim, “I left with the same impression that everyone else had,” Tonka said. “She’s evil.” Two attorneys I spoke with compared Reese to the devil; one called her “Satan incarnate.” (Reese, reached by phone, declined to comment.)


She lays traps, twists respondents’ words against them, and uses the intricacies of immigration law to ensure that her decisions are nearly impossible to overturn on appeal.

(ICE has taken advantage of the difficulty of appeals in the region by more than tripling its detention space in Louisiana since February. Donald Trump’s Justice Department has sent six new immigration judges to rural Louisiana.)

[CurtEastPoint]

1. And of course, she's a preacher of some sort. Evil cow.

[emmaverybo]

2. Sounds like a sick puppy to me. Wonder what trauma she has suffered in life to make her so

pitiless.

[dalton99a]

3. "Prosecutors browse for clothes online while Reese does their jobs for them"

When deciding asylum cases, immigration judges are supposed to impartially weigh the evidence presented by the asylee and the Department of Homeland Security. (Asylum seekers are not guaranteed an attorney.) But a review of transcripts from six asylum hearings and a visit to her courtroom showed that Reese often acts like the federal immigration prosecutor she was before she was named an immigration judge in 1997. She lays traps, twists respondents’ words against them, and uses the intricacies of immigration law to ensure that her decisions are nearly impossible to overturn on appeal. Al Page, the lawyer who handled Abraham’s appeal for a pro bono legal group, says Reese doesn’t try to learn whether people are deserving of asylum: “She’s entering the situation with the intention to prove that they’re not.” DHS prosecutors remain almost entirely silent in Reese’s courtroom. Jeremy Jong, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center who has appeared before Reese dozens of times, has watched prosecutors browse for clothes online while Reese does their jobs for them.

Unlike some judges, Reese doesn’t often make small talk with immigration attorneys, and the lawyers I spoke with knew little about her personal life. Alvin Sharp, a fellow judge and pastor in Louisiana, grew up near Reese in rural northern Louisiana. They became friends at Southern University Law Center in Baton Rogue in the late 1980s, where he was struck by her seriousness. In law school, while Sharp and his other friends might spend an evening eating wings at Hooters before cramming all night, Reese would be in bed by 10 o’clock, he says. When complex legal issues came up, people would turn to Reese, saying, “Agnelis, break it down.” Sharp remembers a meeting where Reese and another member of their study group disagreed about what to do next. Reese prevailed after Sharp said, “We bow to the queen.” The nickname stuck.

When Sharp turned down a job as an immigration prosecutor in Oakdale, he recommended Reese, who got the position. To the best of Sharp’s knowledge, Reese has never been married or had kids. He’s never seen her in a relationship, either.

At the pulpit, Reese is far more animated than in court, but her no-nonsense style remains apparent. In a Palm Sunday sermon posted to Facebook in April, Reese related a New Testament story about Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers he believed were polluting the temple with commerce. She compared his actions to something her parents would tell her as a kid: “It’s my house. And my rules…And if you don’t want to do what I say, you got to go.” She seems to apply the same dictum to her courtroom.

[uponit7771]

4. damn