Nominee for U.S. Attorney Faces Doubts About Postville Role
Published April 06, 2009 @ 09:15PM PT
Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has nominated Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose for the position of U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa. This nomination is getting some much-deserved pushback based on Rose's participation in the railroad justice last year following the ICE raid at the Agriprocessors plant at Postville.
I have nothing against Rose on a personal level; I'm sure she's a dedicated public servant and by her colleagues' accounts, a great coworker. But I do have a problem with her taking over as U.S. Attorney after her role in the national shame of the Postville legal proceedings last year.
Here are some of the due process problems with the Postville proceedings noted in this article:
Denying adequate legal representation by assigning as many as 17 defendants to an attorney; the breakdown of separation of powers when Chief Judge Linda R. Reade participated in ex-parte communications by approving plea agreements and moving the court an hour north to Waterloo without the defense's knowledge; and the use of aggressive plea agreements that expired after seven days.
These shady actions were designed to exploit the cracks between the immigration and criminal justice systems to put the defendants in an impossible position: take the pleas arranged by the public defenders, the judge, and the prosecution, serve five months in prison, get deported and never come back OR take the risk of a two year jail sentence with the same consequences at the end. Meanwhile, your family in Guatemala starves.
Postville migrants were begging to be released to go support their families in Guatemala. But Rose and the other prosecutors colluded with the federal judge to ram these cases through before anyone could raise an effective defense.
Rose doesn't see the Postville cases as a liability, but rather as a success story.
Executing the massive operation required amazing efforts and a "ton of good work," she said, though she expects to be grilled on the matter if she faces Congress during a confirmation hearing.
Anyone who is proud of what happened at Postville shouldn't have a license to practice law, much less get a promotion out of it.
Rose said any criticisms over the court proceedings at National Cattle Congress have come from people outside the process.
First of all, that's not true-Erik Camayd-Freixas was a federal interpreter at Postville so upset by what he saw that he blew the whistle on the sham proceedings.
Second, Rose and her colleagues worked to close off the process to anyone who might have slowed it down, like immigration attorneys who actually understood the consequences of what the public defenders were advising their clients--all 17 of them per attorney--to do. So her complaint that any criticism came from outside the process is disingenuous at best.
She noted no public defenders who represented clients in the case have expressed such grave concerns.
That may in part be because the PDs didn't come out of this smelling like roses. Many probably didn't at the time understood the harsh consequences of their advice and don't seem to have done much good for their clients, the vast majority of whom were deported after serving five months in prison. Most of those clients will not be able to come back to the U.S. anytime soon, if at all, regardless of their U.S. citizen family members left behind. Representation on these kinds of criminal charges by lawyers who know nothing about immigration law is not adequate representation, and Rose did not serve the interests of justice by exploiting that knowledge gap in order to chalk up more victories for her promotion. Each tally for her represented a life destroyed or a family broken.
Marcelo Ballvé recently wrote in Mother Jones about how the Agriprocessors raid has devastated the town of Postville. You can see the consequences on small towns like Postville of the decades-long, bipartisan effort to criminalize immigration, an approach completely untethered from fairness or proportionality. This type of work should be condemned rather than rewarded.
(Via ImmigrationProf Blog)
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Comments (3)
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David is an attorney in Philadelphia, PA, where he helps immigrants to the U.S. navigate the complex immigration legal system. Views he expresses at change.org are his alone and don't represent the views or opinions of his employer, Nationalities Service Center. The information contained on this site is intended for educational and advocacy purposes only.
Detaned illegal aliens do no have the right to an attorney in deportation proceeding, how then could one call the 17-1 representation as inadequate?
Posted by Wire Paladin on 04/07/2009 @ 12:56PM PT
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We're talking about criminal proceedings. One PD for 17 immigrants in criminal proceedings.
Posted by Dave Bennion on 04/07/2009 @ 02:34PM PT
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"Nominee for U.S. attorney under fire for role in Postville raid" (Waterloo Courier, April 5, 2009)
As the May 12th anniversary of the Postville Iowa Agriprocessors ICE raid is near, I am writing call attention to a very troubling injustice that is developing that only rubs salt in the wound.
We all should be outraged how immigrants working in Postville were treated like slaves and then denied any form of justice in swift and chaotic criminal court proceedings orchestrated by the Northern Iowa United States Attorney's office. Apparently the reports about the shame of Postville didn't reach the US Senate because unbelievably now one of the lead federal prosecutors responsible for the egregious and inhumane Postville, Iowa prosecution has been recommend to be promoted to the powerful position of United States Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa.
Ms. Stephanie Rose is the nominee of United States Senator Tom Harkin to be the next United States Attorney of the Northern District of Iowa. (U.S.A) The White House is now reviewing Senator Harkin's questionable recommendation. The President's legal team will be conducting a background check on Ms Rose's personal and professional record before deciding whether to formally nominate her to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. Accordingly there is time to impact this appointment and I am told that the White House will be very interested in learning about Ms. Rose's sorry record as a prosecutor.
As Deputy Criminal Chief of the Northern District U.S.A. office, Ms. Rose played a pivotal leadership role in policy making in an U.S.A. office widely known for ruthless tactics and rarely granting mercy in arguing sentencing cases. As Deputy Criminal Chief, she helped design, organize and execute the unprecedented use of expedited trials to convict 306 undocumented workers at the Postville, Iowa meat processing plant in May 2008.
For background see
1, The Shame of Postville, Iowa (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun2.html)
2. The Jungle Again (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/opinion/13sun2.html)
3. Few, if any, of the mostly illiterate Guatemalan defendants had any opportunity to consult with immigration lawyer about potential eligibility for immigration relief. Translator Dr. Camayd-Freizas expressed disgust saying he felt "blindsided into an assignment (he) wanted no part of. In all (his) years as a court interpreter, (he) was assigned to criminal cases involving rape, murder, mayhem, narcotics, human trafficking, and terrorism." Yet nothing could have prepared him for this spectacle of injustice "put(ting) hundreds of innocent people in jail," terrorizing them, and devastating their small community. (See http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Camayd-Freixas080724.pdf and his interview is at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/us/11immig.html
It is impossible to understand what grounds Ms Rose and her colleagues had for choosing to exercise their prosecutorial discretion in this case with such aggression and lack of respect for due process, other than the requirements of their own ambition. They brought the full force of the USA office to bear on the most vulnerable members of a community with full knowledge that the U.S. Department of Labor was conducting an ongoing investigation of child- labor and wage violations at the plant where these same workers were being victimized. All of these workers were laboring in one of our most physically demanding industries, meatpacking-- an industry that historically has relied on immigrants. The workers were doing nothing more than striving to support themselves and their families. Rather than treat them with dignity, Ms Rose and her colleagues chose to grind them down further. They took advantage of the workers' lack of resources, limited rights, and lack of powerful friends.
Even if that were not the case, Ms Rose and her team helped in expending vast resources to no useful end - a massive raid, the arrest hundreds of people, negotiated pleas, all done with cattle-call trials in cattle-ground trailers, and jailed hundreds of people for five months each, after which they were deported. Why did they bother? The workers were deportable anyway and the same end could have been achieved without all of the shameful pageantry. That, of course, would not have given Ms. Rose and her colleagues the chance to splash themselves all over the headlines and build their statistics. Postville was a massive failure on many levels, not the least of which was a failure of prosecutorial judgment. The fact that Ms Rose played a "central role" in this travesty is very disturbing. Her role in Postville should render her unfit to be a viable candidate to serve as a USA in the Obama Administration.
Here is a very interesting fact about the federal ICE prosecutions made in FY 2008 across the USA: In work site raids, ICE made 5184 Administrative arrests and 1103 criminal arrests --so of the 306 Postville criminal arrests and convictions amounted to almost 1/3 of all criminal ICE cases in the USA for FY08! That only happened because of Ms Rose's use of her prosecutorial power. How can her Postville conduct and decisions possibly be justified?
Another very troubling aspect of the Postville raid is how different the procedures implemented by Ms Rose and her staff were at Postville. Her decisions to prosecution criminally the workers led to a much higher proportion of criminal arrests and convictions to administrative arrests. Following the Postville raid ICE carried out two large raids in Laurel, Mississippi, and in Greenville, South Carolina. In Laurel, ICE detained approximately 600 persons and the US attorney chose to criminally prosecute only eight (8) persons. In Greenville, ICE detained approximately 300; the US attorney chose to criminally prosecute only eleven (11) persons. While I have concerns about those raids from an immigration-policy perspective, the Laurel and Greenville prosecutions were for the most part typical federal criminal prosecutions in that each attorney represented only one defendant and there was a regular criminal schedule.
This is all spelled out in a well written report issued on March 20, 2009, to the Urban Institute entitled "Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America's Immigration Enforcement Policy." This report includes a careful review of the Postville May 2008 cases. (See pages 57-64 for chapter on Postville Raid www.dorsey.com/files/upload/DorseyProBonoSeveringLifelineweb.pdf
What possible justification does Ms Rose have for her Postville prosecution numbers compared to Laurel and Greenville?
With the fastest growing minority population in the nation and with over 25 percent of the U.S. population expected to be Latinos soon, it is extremely important that President fill all federal appointments with people who are truly interested in the principles of justice. Ms. Rose is an ethically challenged prosecutor who does not deserve this appointment.
Senator Harkin's pick was made with no input from the Civil Rights groups or the Hispanic community. His pick is a great insult to us all who care about Justice.
"Nominee for U.S. attorney under fire for role in Postville raid" (Waterloo Courier, April 5, 2009) http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2009/04/05/news/politics/11154625.txt
Thankfully, top lawyers in Iowa are fighting her nomination but they could use some help!!
Please contact the groups listed below and ask them to ask President Obama to stop Stephanie Rose's nomination:
The Hispanic House Caucus: chc@mail.house The Hispanic National Bar Association: dcabrera@hnba.com ACLU: media@dcaclu.org American Immigration Lawyers Association: executive@aila.orgPosted by Anthony Sanchez on 04/18/2009 @ 06:37PM PT
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