Good afternoon. Welcome to the Bloomington Rotary Club's weekly celebration of service. I'm Steve Wicks,
and I'm honored to serve as your president this year. Please silence your electronic devices. On this
day in history, March 10th, 1971, the US Senate voted 94 to 0 to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18.
Dave Meyer will deliver today's reflection. Thank you, President Steve. Today, I'd like to reflect the
title of my reflection is energy making a difference for today and tomorrow.
I'm sure many of you noticed or heard about that yesterday the price of oil soared to $130 a barrel
before retreating. I have no idea what it is today. Who knows what it will be today? Who knows what
it will be tomorrow? Who knows what it will be in a year's time? Well, America is unique in oil. It
is number one in world consumption of oil.
Part of that is driven by the fact that we're also number one in the number of internal combustion vehicles
in the world. So I'm here to reflect on changing this. So electric vehicles or EVs can make an enormous
difference in changing our oil addiction and in reducing our economic volatility. Obviously, they're
major environmental considerations as well.
Let me start with my own experience. Cindy and I are now a two EV family. We bought our first EV as
a secondary car eight years ago. We replaced our primary car with a used EV two years ago. That was
the last time that we went to a gas station.
had an oil change, had a tune-up, had a break job. We would never go back to a gasoline car. You might
say, why not just buy a hybrid vehicle? You can save gas and not have to worry about the range of an
EV battery. A lot of people agree with that, and the sale of hybrid vehicles is soaring across the US.
But a gasoline car has more than 2000 moving parts to maintain and break down, while an EV has 20 moving
parts, 2000 to 20. A hybrid has both a gasoline engine and an EV motor and battery components. So it
has even more parts
to wear and break down than a gasoline car. Let's talk about fuel. Assuming that gas costs $3 per gallon,
and your fuel economy is, say, 28 miles per gallon, and you live in an area with average electricity
costs, average electricity rates,
A gas car requires about 12 cents per mile in fuel costs, while an EV operates each mile for less than
a nickel. That's 12 cents to less than five cents per mile in fuel costs. Our primary car goes 270 miles
on a full battery charge.
It recharges in about 15 minutes on the highway at a high-speed charger, like the chargers we have on
both the East Tesla chargers that we have both on the East side and the West side of Bloomington. We
find that there are high-speed chargers available about every 50 miles on interstates. Now, we're all
Rotarians, plus a few guests.
and we try to follow the rotary four-way test to the best of our ability. For us, one way that we try
to follow the third item, is it beneficial to all concerned, is by driving electric vehicles.
Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Eric Coyne will introduce our guests today.
Thanks, Steve. Dave said he'll be giving everybody who needs a ride home later a ride in his new car.
So it's my pleasure to introduce Bob Heatherington, a guest of Jeff. Where's Bob? Where's Bob?
Pete Linson. Pete, there's Pete. Guest of Tam, thanks. And Tina Zmick, my guest.
And it also today, Tina works with me at Ivy Tech and today is Tina's birthday, so. Are there any guests
online? We have someone maybe not so familiar to the club, Kay Johnson, who is the chief communications
and grants officer at Health Net with Cindy and she is a member
as a business member. HealthNode is a business member, but you know, I think it'd be nice to also welcome
her. Well, is Kay here or online? She's online. Online. Welcome, Kay. And I don't think anybody else
online is a guess. Okay, I'm not seeing anything. Okay. All right. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Eric, and Tina, that piece of cake in front of you is birthday cake. We're on the subject
of birthdays. We have a couple of birthdays to observe. First of all, Rex Hillary has a birthday on
the 13th, and Scott Shackelford has a birthday on the 16th. Anniversaries, Jim Capshaw on the 13th,
eight years. Announcements.
Sorry about another bad parking day. Remember, we have passes that we can give club members to park
at Atwater or Henderson free of charge. We've created a sheet on how to use the parking at Henderson.
It's a little bit tricky getting out of Henderson. So if you have any interest in that, see me or see
Mandy. Rotary District Conference, May 8th and 9th at the Galt House in Louisville.
Lots of fun things to do Friday evening. Saturday will be lots of interesting programs. So if you haven't
done so already, please sign up. See me if you're interested in more information. And you can go online
and register at rotaryallstars.com. Chamber of Commerce, their business after hours this month will
be 530 to 730 on March 25th at One World Catering. See Chris M.G. or see me if you'd like more information.
The 13th of March is the Rotorack anniversary. And the Rotorack is the rotary option for college students.
We have a very active IU Rotorack club. Alan Barker is the advisor. But those Rotoractors at IU, they're
out doing some volunteer activity or another almost every weekend. So anyway, we observe the Rotoractors today.
tables, you'll see district grant handouts. Once again, we're at the front end of the next district
grant process, which means that not-for-profits that have a project in mind, a ballpark $6,000, will
apply for the district grant. So please take a handout home if you're interested. If you have any questions,
Sarah Laughlin is the club member who is running the district grant process this year.
Um, Tyler, we ready for the. I'm going to start by saying happy dollar proceeds in March and April will
be given to the Bloomington Rotary Foundation. And we'll move on to membership. So our club has a healthy
mix of new members and members who have been part of the club for decades. Here's a picture that was
taken this summer when our district governor Carrie Aiken came to visit.
And you can see all the club members who are in attendance that day. But our quiz today is, which of
these Rotarians has been a member of the Bloomington Rotary Club for the fewest years? And the choices
are Helen Stroman, Peggy Frisbee, Wendell St. John, and Fred Dunn.
And so here's Ellen on the left and then she's sitting in the front table. Put up your hand, Ellen.
Okay. And then next to her is Peggy Frisbee. So these are our first two choices. Peggy is our Zoom host
today. And then the other choices are Wendell St. John and Fred Dunn. Wendell St. John standing right
there or sitting right there with his hand up. He's in this picture on the left. He is the taller of
the two. I think this picture was taken on his birthday here.
about a few months ago, and then Fred Dunn on the right. So if you think Ellen Strohman is the club
member of these four with the fewest years of service, put up your hand. Okay, we have a few.
And do the same, put up your hand online. Okay, Peggy Frisbee here on the right. If you think Peggy
is the club member with the fewest years of service,
Put up your hand. Oh, Peggy's not getting any votes. Wendell St. John, sitting here on the second table.
If you think Wendell is the club member with the fewest years of service in this group. OK, Wendell,
I see three votes in the room, including your own. Oh, four now.
And then on the right, Fred Dunn. If you think Fred Dunn is the club member with the fewest years of
service, put up your hand. OK, Fred often attends online. I don't know if he's with us today. And the
answer is Ellen Strohman. So Ellen.
Ellen was a Rotarian in Wisconsin for many years. She and her husband both are very active in their
club. And then Ellen joined our club here last year. If you voted for Peggy, I'm afraid you're incorrect,
but nobody voted for Peggy, so we're good there. Peggy's been a club member for 28 years. She is active
in the Rotary Foundation Committee. She is active, especially active,
in youth services when we have an exchange student. And once again, she's this year for the first time.
This is her second time. She's volunteering as a Zoom host. So Peggy does a lot for the club.
Wendell St. John, for the three or four of you who voted for Wendell, I'm afraid you're incorrect. Wendell
is relatively new. He joined the club in 2019. So the picture here is Wendell and her sponsor, Tim Jessen.
Wendell's really interesting. He spent a good chunk of his career teaching in Japan and he has really
interesting stories about that. And if you voted for Fred Dunn and none of you did so, you would have
been way wrong because Fred has been a club member since 1973. So he'll be celebrating his 53rd anniversary
this year. The Dunn family has been in Bloomington for years and years and years.
If I have this correct, Fred told me a story. One of my early meetings as a club member, and he talked
about he grew up in a house that now the Kelly School of Business sits on that property. And of course,
you recognize the Dunn name, Dunn Meadow, right outside the union here. So what do we conclude from
all of this? There is no right time to join Rotary. Whether you're 25 or 95, it's a good time to join Rotary.
And hopefully if you join when you're 25 in 53 years, they'll be putting your name up on your picture
up on a screen somewhere So Tyler Well get ready for a video seven areas of focus and March is water
sanitation and hygiene month and we have a short video from Rotary International
Rotary knows that providing access to clean water around the world is about more than digging wells.
That's why Rotary brings together community leaders, governments and agencies to plan policies and funding
that ensure permanent access to water. Be part of the solution. Learn more.
So water was the subject of Bill Brown's reflection last week, and we'll be hearing about water all
month. We have a few minutes for happy dollars. So is anyone happy today? I am happy because my son
and granddaughter who live in Texas are visiting tomorrow for a few days.
I have a banker today. Hi there. I'm happy because I planted pansies on Sunday and my daffodils are
in bloom. Hi. Five happy dollars that I made it back from Houston. Did you remember that there's a government
shutdown? TSA workers didn't show up at Hobby Airport Sunday morning. I had an 11 AM flight. Oops, got
back last night. So I'm happy.
Oh, okay. I am happy. I want to report, you know, kind of the end of a story. Many of you followed the
plight of the Mohammadi family and their newest member of their family, Jawad, who's married to Aminah
Mohammadi.
He was apprehended by ICE. And the club helped raise money to challenge his illegal detention. And that
was one. And thanks to everybody that contributed to that. And I just wanted to end it by saying that
he was released in January, I think on the 16th of January. It was two days before Cindy and I went
for extended vacation in Mexico. And Chawid is our primary house and cat sitter. And so we were really
thrilled for that reason that he got out. But he is, without a doubt, the most expensive cat sitter
we've ever employed. So thank you all for contributing to our cat sitter.
Hello, I'm happy to report that my daughter is now have chickens. She has five Wyandotte and they're
going to be beautiful when they get bigger and somebody played a trick on her and put an already egg
in them thing for her. But it wasn't even April Fool's. That was kind of funny.
Good to see everybody. And then also just really excited for spring. Going to go catch an IU baseball
game this afternoon. So just thinking spring, hopefully it's not the fall spring that we're all used
to. And then do we have one online? Yes, I'm right. After last week, a Tuesday meeting while I'm sitting
in my living room reading my book,
I lift up my eye, and suddenly, surprised and stunned by my daughter's appearance from Boston, came
to wish me happy birthday. For that, I gave $5. I think we might have one more.
Alan, why don't you tell me what it is and then I'll repeat it for the group. Thanks, Sandy. Yes,
I have one. Hello, everybody. Our dinner theater event is scheduled for April 10th and 11th at the Country Club.
featuring VIP women in our community doing a reading theater of a Maya Angelou poem entitled A Letter
to My Daughter. And it is going to be read by VIP women in our community, including our
Fabulous Joy Harger and Sylvia McNair. Tickets are $85, and this will help significantly with our relocation
fund. We are doing this in partnership with our friends at the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra and our
local Girl Scouts. So that should finally be posted after a glitch on our website today, and we'd be
so thrilled for all of you to be there. Thanks.
As you know, I'm Ellen Stroman, and I want to, first of all, I'm so happy that I was able to join Rotary
here. I belonged to Rotariums a number of times in different areas. And so I was so excited when you
had the discussion on water, because I had taken over
our business after my husband's death, and no one knew of a woman and a colleague in water. So that
meant learning the testing, and I had just such a great time, especially in the schools.
didn't know much about the water situation. So thank you so much for allowing me to be one
of your representatives. Thank you, Ellen. For those who might not have been able to hear her, she talked
about in Wisconsin after her husband died, she took over the family Culligan water business and she
was a water pioneer in the state of Wisconsin.
Michael Shermas will introduce our speaker today. Good afternoon. At Rotary, we value the exchange of
diverse ideas and the exploration of challenging topics. On occasion, we tackle a tougher topic in an
effort to explore the complexities and gain insights. Today, we are joined by Christy Popp, an immigration
attorney at
Pop Bowman, Attorneys at Law in Bloomington, Indiana. And I'll briefly tell you her qualifications in
a second, but she will be sharing her analysis of the current state of immigration in the US, a subject
that continues to shape our current landscape. In the spirit of academic professional curiosity, we
welcome a range of viewpoints during the question and answer session, provided they're shared with mutual respect.
Christie handles humanitarian, e.g. asylum, and family-based immigration cases, student visa cases,
and naturalizations, as well as detention and removal deportation defense. In addition, Christie periodically
teaches asylum law as an adjunct at Indiana University's Morrill School of Law in Bloomington.
Before starting her own legal practice in 2012, Christie worked as a director and staff attorney at
the Immigrants and Language Rights Center at
Indiana Legal Services and as a legal consultant for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. Christy
currently serves on the board of Exodus Refugee and she serves on the Asylum and Refugee Publications
Committee of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Outside of her work, Christy is a mother
of three kids and a lover of all things outside, especially running, hiking, camping, and gardening.
She graduated with her JD in 2005 from Vermont Law School and her BA in 2001 from Indiana University
Bloomington. And I've known her for about 10 years or so because I asked her to come speak to the Domestic
Violence Coalition back then when I used to run that. And she was great then. I'm sure she'll be now.
Without further ado, welcome Christy. Hey, everyone.
slides. Once those get up, I'll get going. So this is a huge topic in a very, very small amount of time.
And I have many, many slides that I know that I'm not going to get to. So if anybody wants the slides,
they will be available if you just want information.
Because it's not enough time to really get into the nitty gritty of immigration and the changes, I thought
I would focus more broadly on what we're seeing on the ground with a lot of statistics. I wanted to
talk about whether the goal that was professed as the goal for deporting many people and getting our
immigration system under control has worked and what we're really seeing.
To that end, I'm gonna get started here. So first, I'm just gonna say I'm not a statistician. I'm not
a researcher. I analyze the law. So all of the stats that I gave you, I didn't make up. I got them from
reputable places. And these are some of the places that I got those statistics from. The professed goal of
the new administration when they came in was to fix the immigration system by deporting what they call
the illegal immigrants. I don't use the term illegal immigrants for many reasons that I don't wanna
spend time talking about. I tend to use the word undocumented. And there is around 10 million undocumented
people. What I mean by undocumented, I mean people who entered the country on visas,
and overstayed and kind of went under the radar. Or people who crossed the border, what we call, entered
without inspection and were never detected and are kind of living under the radar. That is what immigration,
what we define as undocumented. But the administration has kind of expanded what they call undocumented
or illegal immigrants to include people who came in the right way
who applied for asylum and who are going through all of the right processes. So there's a sort
of criminalization, so to speak, of people who are doing the right thing. And I say criminalization,
so to speak, because immigration is civil. They're not crime. So if you come in and you overstay your
visa, you didn't commit a crime. If you entered with crossing the border and applied for asylum and
turned yourself in,
you're doing what the law says you're supposed to do. So I wanna make that clear. Those are the facts.
Trump says that he wanted to fix our immigration system, but I think it's important to look at the terms
that he has used when talking about immigration. He said that immigrants are poisoning the blood of
the United States. He's called Mexicans rapists, Somalis garbage,
immigrants are animals and they're invading our country, and Haitian immigrants are eating the pets.
This is the rhetoric that we're hearing on immigration from the president himself. And though those
were his own words, we actually are seeing that rhetoric turned into policy throughout the government.
So these are screenshots from social media sites.
This is the Department of Homeland Securities. They were recruiting ICE officers with the We'll Have
Our Home Again. According to the New York Times, that is actually the title of a song written by white
supremacists and embraced by Proud Boys, and the song was included on the original social media feed.
The Department of Labor, Trust the Plan, Trust Trump. Trust the Plan is the central
This is from the White House's Twitter feed. Remigration. Remigration is a European concept centered
on the expulsion of non-white people and immigrants deemed unassimilated.
One homeland, one people, one heritage. This is the Department of Labor. That phrase is similar to the
German slogan, ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer, or one people, one realm, one leader. Now
taken individually, maybe these wouldn't mean much. But when you take them as a whole together, it seems
like it's government policy implemented in this way.
So is the goal to make our country secure and safe from non-criminals, people who haven't violated the
law, or is it something else? So how has this been implemented? Well, these are, again, I didn't make
up these statistics. I got these all from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which compiled
them all. So this is how we're starting to see
This rhetoric on immigration be implemented into policy. Last summer, Congress approved a $170 billion
immigration enforcement package. That funding is more than all 50 states combined spend on their policing
every year. And the budget for ICE alone exceeds the budget for all non-immigration federal law enforcement
put together.
So that's the FBI, the ATF, all of these other organizations. ICE's budget exceeds that. That's important
because remember, ICE is enforcing immigration, which is not criminal, right? These are civil violations.
Less than 8% of the $170 billion is for immigration courts.
So what we're seeing on the ground are more detentions and more deportation cases, but very little money
given to the immigration courts. And that has resulted in a huge due process crisis in the immigration
courts. So here's some numbers on what we're seeing with detentions. In February,
February of this year, 68,000 people were currently in ICE detention. That doesn't include people necessarily
in local jails waiting for ICE to pick them up. So that's up 75% from the year before. But only 14%
of those people have criminal records. 14% of the 400,000 detained last year. So is the goal security?
I don't know. I'm going to leave that for you to decide. But what's going on is that we're putting people
into seriously unsafe detention facilities, many of which are private prisons. And these private prisons
have investors in the White House itself. Stephen Miller, who has
been the architect of the immigration plan, has invested a lot of money in the private prison industry.
And that's very important. These private prisons have horrible conditions. There are conditions in which
people are treated like animals. They're not given good food. They're not given medical care. And as
a consequence, 40 immigrants died in custody. 32 last year and then total this year has been about seven
in January alone.
And at least one of those deaths was a homicide. Of course, we don't know what's going on in these detention
facilities, so there could be more. This could be an undercount, and there could be more homicides that
we don't know about. But we also know that in the last year, three US citizens have been killed. Alex
Preti and Renee Goode. Sorry, it says Preti. That was autocorrect. It's supposed to be P-R-E-T-T-I.
I just noticed that, sorry. Alex Preti.
Renee Good, and then Ray Martinez, who was killed in Texas. This has just come out recently about his
murder because it was framed that he had been trying to do something. Unfortunately, the only witness
that was on the side of Mr. Martinez, he also recently died. So I'm not sure what's gonna happen there.
Now you might hear, well,
The people who are protesting are making it more dangerous for ICE agents. So they have to have these
aggressive tactics. They have to go in cities and be masked. They have to go in cities with tear gas
and they have to be armed. But is it dangerous to be an ICE agent? I want you to know that it's not,
okay? There's been one homicide ever.
of a deportation officer, and that was in 1949, and the man was giving breakfast to a detainee when
he was murdered. It is more dangerous to be a child in America's schools than to be an ICE agent. So
I hope when you hear that these ICE agents have to have these aggressive tactics against American citizens
protesting, that you know that it is not true. Now, continuing with some numbers,
In addition to the $170 billion that we set aside for immigration enforcement, $40 million has been
spent to pay foreign countries to take our deportees. And these deportees were people who were offered
protection in the United States. These were people who won protection here from persecution in their
home country, and the Trump administration did not want them to be here anymore, so they deported them.
but not to their home country, because that would have violated international law. Instead, we paid
$40 million for other countries to take 300 deportees. And one of the more famous cases was a man from
Jamaica who was sent to a small country in Africa that I think is called Eswatini. I'm not entirely
sure how to pronounce it correctly. But we've also paid Equatorial Guinea, South Sudan,
Uganda, Ecuador, El Salvador, to take deportees who should never have been deported. The Trump administration
has also stripped over 1.6 million immigrants of their legal status so that they could be called illegal
immigrants and so that they could be put into deportation proceedings. Now, the courts are not happy
with this.
a lot of the detentions that we're seeing, so people are stripped of their legal status, they're arrested,
they're put into detention, or they're doing everything right. They're going to their immigration hearing
and they're detained at their immigration hearing. Or maybe they're just a little five-year-old boy
who is coming home from school and who's picked up by an ICE officer. All of these detentions are unlawful
and the courts have been flooded
with what are called petitions for the writ of habeas corpus. It's a special request saying that a detention
is unlawful. There have been over 20,000 of these filed in federal courts. So far, 4,000 rulings have
found that Trump detained those immigrants unlawfully. And I wanted to quote that there are lots of
cases right now pending. And I wanted to quote from a couple of them.
One of the things that the Trump administration did in Minnesota was they detained refugees, particularly
Somali refugees who came here as refugees. They were lawfully present here. They spent years abroad
going through background checks before they were allowed into the country. And the Trump administration
detained them and flew them to Texas. And this judge was very upset.
And he said that he will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous interpretation to
terrorize refugees who would be welcomed. The court will not allow those who relied on this nation's
promise of safety to be met with handcuffs. The Constitution requires steadiness, fidelity to statute,
and respect for promises made. The rule of law demands less.
I wanna highlight the rule of law because that is what we're being told is the reason for all of these
detentions, that this is about the rule of law. And yet we're seeing detentions that are unlawful. The
famous case of Liam Conejo, the little five-year-old with the rabbit ear hat and the Spider-Man backpack,
he was detained with his father and the judge who freed him was not happy. And I would encourage you
to read the entire decision. It's only about three pages. It's a beauty. But here are some of the quotes.
Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration
of Independence. The judge then goes on to explain why that's applicable, but I didn't copy the whole
thing here. Civics lesson to the government. Administrative warrants do not pass probable cause muster.
The ICE, when they arrest an immigrant, they use an administrative warrant. That is an ICE officer who
says, I think this person may be removable. Supervisor, can you sign this? There's no judge that reviews
this. So the court says that he's going to free Liam. And he says, observing human behavior confirms
that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest
know no bounds and are bereft of human decency, and the rule of law be damned. You'll see this over
and over in these judicial opinions, judges pointing out that the rule of law demands more than what
the Trump administration is doing in these immigration cases, over 4,400 of them. And yet the Trump
administration continues to violate these court orders.
In one month alone, they violated 96 of these judicial orders to free unlawfully detained immigrants.
And the chief federal judge in Minneapolis said that ICE may have broken more court orders in that one
month than agencies do in their entire history. And we have 24 documented cases, there are probably
more, in which the administration misrepresented facts to the judges. So,
From my perspective, from a humanitarian side, this is terrible. But let's talk about it from an economic
side. People are scared to come to the United States. They're not coming anymore. I have noticed a huge
part of my work for years was representing students in asylum cases. I've had zero this year, zero.
And that was a huge part of my legal practice. Why?
Because students aren't coming. And the only ones coming are really wealthy ones who can go back to
their countries, right? Who aren't afraid. The same with tourists. Tourists aren't coming. People are
scared. And undocumented immigrants are leaving. They're not coming either. And they have been working
in our hospitality, our construction industries. So 98,000 fewer employed hospitality workers
In one year, a $1.2 billion decline in tourism revenue in one year. International visitors to the US
declined by 2.5 million in 2025, even as tourism was rising around the world. In Minneapolis alone,
The small businesses there in Minneapolis lost $81 million in revenue in January of 2026 due to a 15%
decline in overall international air travel. Although I don't know who wants to go to Minneapolis in
January. They must have a lot of people there. It wouldn't have been me. But Las Vegas, where a lot
of people go, saw a 7.5% decline. And we're seeing slowing job growth in many industries, construction,
manufacturing,
I think we're gonna see it really this year in farming too and agriculture. It's gonna be a big one,
right? So the rest of my slides focus on getting into the nitty gritty of what has changed, but it goes
deep and I could speak for hours on that and I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna let people ask questions,
but I just wanna tell you in terms of immigration,
In the last year, we have seen about 650 policy changes in immigration. And around 125 of them are wrapped
up in litigation. So that's been a lot, 650 policy changes. Those are regulatory changes, legal decisions.
It's overwhelming. But the majority of what has changed has been
really to the detriment of immigrants. The laws have been changed to make it harder to immigrate here,
harder to get legal status here, harder to fight a deportation. And we can argue about whether that's
right or wrong. That's an opinion. But we can't really argue about the facts, right? Everyone's entitled
to their own opinion on this situation, but not the facts. And the fact is that we're seeing humans,
immigrants,
being detained at massive numbers, being stripped of their legal status, and having their constitutional
rights violated. So I'm going to leave it there and take questions for the next 15 or so minutes. Christie,
thank you for an excellent presentation. I have a question.
very few people understand the notion of a writ of habeas corpus and unlawful detention. Can you explain
how that kind of works in our legal framework and kind of where that comes from and what the meaning
is behind that? So I'm not a scholar of legal traditions. I can't speak. I know it is an ancient, at
least in common law, it comes from England.
In terms of what it means for immigration law, if immigration or any law enforcement agency detained
somebody unlawfully, meaning that they didn't have probable cause that the person had committed a crime,
there was no warrant, if any aspect of that detention violated the Fourth Amendment, then the individual detained
could go into federal court and ask the federal judge to order them released. In the immigration context,
if the person, in some circumstances, the judges will order a bond hearing. So if somebody is undocumented
and they're detained and there's something unlawful about it, often the federal judges will say immigration
judges have to hold a bond hearing. Now that's one aspect where we've seen
a lot of violations of the law. In fact, a court in California in a class action said that the immigration
courts could no longer detain a certain group of people, which would be people who entered the country
without inspection. The Trump administration was holding them without bond hearings based on an erroneous
interpretation of the statute. A federal district court said, you can't do that.
the Department of Justice issued a memo to all of their attorneys and judges and said, ignore the court
order. We're going to continue. So this is where we're seeing kind of the federal courts order something
and then the immigration judges are supposed to grant bond hearings and they're not doing that. Christie,
you mentioned the rise in detentions and, um,
The backlog is increasing. There's been a precipitous drop in the number of immigration judges, particularly
in the asylum field. Could you talk about the rationale why these judges, many times with decades of
experience, are being let go and the impact on the total system? There has been a purge of over 100
immigration judges over the last year. Most of them were fired.
Many of them were fired on the bench. They were literally sitting on the bench when they got the email.
Immigration judges are employees of the Department of Justice. So when we think of our three branches
of government and we think about how we have the executive, the legislature, and the judicial Article
III, immigration courts are actually under the executive branch. So they're employees and can be fired
seemingly at will, although that's being challenged.
So the Trump administration has fired 100 judges at a time when the numbers of deportations are increasing.
And most of those judges had high asylum grant rates. That was the basis for their firing. Anyone who
had an asylum grant rate over 50% was fired. So we're left with immigration judges that have lower grant
rates, usually in the 20 to 30%.
And on top of that, we're getting temporary judges who are primarily JAG attorneys. So part of the army,
army attorneys. That means that they are beholden to their commander in chief, not necessarily to the
Department of Justice. In their training, a whistleblower said that they have specifically been told
not to grant asylum. So we already have a couple of JAG attorneys in our Indianapolis immigration court.
Like I said before, a lot of the laws have been changed specifically to make it harder for people to
get status. So firing judges and then hiring temporary judges and telling them not to grant asylum,
that is one of those changes. Thank you for your presentation. You mentioned in response to one of the
earlier questions that basically the
judges have been instructed, various officials, to ignore the court orders. And I'm just wondering what
the strategy is. I mean, I know there's a strategy, I'm sure, at the congressional level to try to change
the law and to make changes. But practically speaking, what does this do for you as an attorney,
day to day? How do you navigate through this, let's call it challenging times, when you have basically
people being told to ignore court orders?
Well, but honestly, it's really hard. I can speak broadly about the immigration bar, that there's a
lot of burnout, and a lot of people are quitting immigration attorneys. It's really hard. I mean, how
do you navigate that? All you can do is keep arguing, and we prepare our cases for the federal court
of appeals. We don't prepare them for the immigration judges. We know we're going to lose at the immigration judge,
we know we're gonna lose at the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is the administrative appellate,
we prepare our cases for the federal courts. And that's all we can do is like, of course, you know,
I'm a private attorney, my clients have to pay, that makes it really hard as well, because they might
not have money. So a lot of people are leaving the country, or they're really, really afraid. It's a
really hard situation.
I've heard discussion from the current administration about reaching back and removing people's citizenship
back to their immigrant parents. And the current citizen is only a citizen because they were born here.
Their parents were immigrants. We're going to make them no longer legal residents or no longer citizens.
Are there any safeguards in place to protect us from that behavior?
in the law? Yeah, so there's one, the Supreme Court. And the case is actually going to be heard in April.
So the 14th Amendment says anybody born on US soil except for people born with parents who have diplomatic
visas are US citizens. The Trump administration created an executive order last year that said that
if your parents were undocumented or were here on a temporary visa, like a student visa,
then your children were not going to be citizens. You had to be here as a permanent resident or citizen.
So that was challenged. It's lost every level. I think it will lose in the Supreme Court too. I think
the 14th Amendment is clear, but. Thank you again for your comments today. Two quick questions.
Number one is, is being in the country without inspection a crime, illegal? And then,
What advice would you give? We all have family and friends that are here legally. What advice would
you give to them to have on the ready if and when something they were to encounter something?
Thank you. Sure. That's a great question. So coming on a visa and overstaying is definitely not a crime.
Crossing the border without a visa is a misdemeanor. So if you're caught crossing a border, you could
be subject to up to six months in jail. It's a very minor misdemeanor.
but it's not one that carries forever. So if I go and I drive 100 miles an hour on I-65, I have engaged
in reckless driving. But if I don't get caught and no one has seen it, then in six months, the police
can't come and say, well, we suspect that you were driving 100 miles an hour. We're going to charge
you with a misdemeanor of reckless driving. It's like it's happened. No one was caught. No one saw it.
It's not going to be charged.
And that's how traditionally this misdemeanor illegal entry was dealt with. Like if nobody saw you crossing,
you weren't charged with it. Because it's kind of like, did it happen at that moment kind of misdemeanor?
Does that make sense? What advice would I give to people? I mean, it's really a very hard situation
right now. Everybody is scared. My naturalized citizen clients are scared they're going to be denaturalized.
My permanent resident clients are scared.
that they're going to be deported even though there's really no reason for that. My naturalized citizen
clients are carrying their passports with them because they're afraid that if ICE finds them that they're
going to be arrested even though they're US citizens and they shouldn't have to carry that identification.
I just advise people to continue to exercise their rights in any situation. You don't have to speak
to an ICE officer.
You have the right to remain silent. You don't have to let them into your house. They have to have a
warrant. So as long as people continue to demand that the constitution is upheld, I think that's the
best that we can do really. Thanks Christy. Thank you for being on my little podcast recently. And we
had a good response to what you shared there. You and I were talking before lunch today,
about a recent episode of the podcast, This American Life. And it dawned on me, a question came up there
that I hadn't thought to ask you. And one of the attorneys who had worked for DHS and then was shocked
when he was training ICE agents by the way the law was being just ignored, was also asked about
the loss of relationships, friends and family and others. And I thought, I should have asked Christy
about that. In your work, do you find yourself in awkward places or in challenging situations where
normally there would just be friendships? Oh, you mean with like family members and friends? With people
in the community, with other attorneys, with, you know. Yeah. Well,
I guess when people find out I'm an immigration lawyer, I can always tell where they stand on immigration
by their response to me. So usually the response is either engaging me in conversation, in which case
they usually are either interested or maybe care about it, or they say nothing. And if they say nothing,
I know that they hate the work that I do and I just don't talk about it. With my own family, I mean,
I have family at the whole spectrum and if they wanna talk to me,
I will talk to them, but I don't provoke that conversation. I haven't lost any family or friends because
of the work that I do, though I have very strong opinions about my work. But like I said, we are all
entitled to our own opinions, and I respect the opinions of everybody. I think everyone has the right
to say their opinions. But as long as when I talk to people, I make sure that they know
but whether their facts are correct or not, because we all have to start on the same page before we
can engage in dialogue. So speaking of challenges as being an immigration attorney, how can communities
or citizens of immigration attorneys be helped by people who live and work around you? How can we help
you? Well, I think
In Monroe County, I feel like there's a lot of support for the immigrant community. I would say I personally
don't need help. The burnout that immigration attorneys are feeling I think is just in the system and
there's nothing that can be done about it. But I think helping others not feel that intense pressure,
helping immigrants feel safe is really the most important thing because that's the hardest part of my job.
the constant calls of people who are worried about what's happening. And so if people feel like they're
in a safe place, then we can help them more legally, if that makes sense. Peggy, go ahead. Yes. Thank
you for recognizing me. OK.
I have two things. One is a comment. I have a niece and a nephew adopted, one from Honduras and one
from Guatemala, and this has created a situation where they have to have their, quote unquote, papers
with them when they go anywhere because, of course, they both look Hispanic, particularly my nephew.
And so, I mean, just the situation that's been created is affecting so many people and is just intolerable.
I do have a question though, Christine, which is what's your take on Indiana as the state in terms of
what's going on here, both positive and negative?
Do I have enough time to respond to this? Okay. SB 76 is a recent law that was passed and signed into
law I think last week or the week before by Governor Braun. I think it's a really dangerous law. I don't
think that the GOP in Indiana really understood immigration law when they wrote it. It's very vague
if we're talking about immigration terms, but in effect what it's going to do
is force government and post-secondary institutions to cooperate with ICE, which basically means let
them enter their property without a warrant. That's all it means is that if you're a police officer,
you're gonna have to have a warrant to enter. If you're an ICE officer getting somebody who hasn't even
committed a crime, no warrant necessary. So that's what the law has done. And they're trying to force
jails to honor detainers. I can give you a whole presentation on detainers that is like an hour long.
We don't have time for that,
suffice to say that the Indiana Court of Appeals has already found these detainers to be violations
of the Fourth Amendment. The General Assembly has now passed a law requiring jails to honor these detainers,
and they created a provision in SB 76 that says that the Attorney General will represent people who
are sued under this law. And why will the Attorney General cover the costs and representation? It's because
all of these laws are going, they violate other laws. So in effect, Indiana General Assembly has passed
a law that they know is going to result in lawsuits because it's illegal. So that's what's going on
now. Thank you. Christy, thank you very much. I could listen to you for another hour for sure.
In honor of your talk, a donation will be made this quarter to Amethyst House. I'd like to thank today's
volunteers, Hoshi Wang, Eric Coyne, Michael Shermas, Peggy Frisbee, Dave Meyer, Ashley Wesley,
Heidi Schultz, Jeff Richardson. Our next meeting will be on March 17th. We'll be back upstairs in the
Georgian room, and I'll be leading our quarterly club assembly, an annual meeting. Tyler, if you'd share
the graphic for the four-way test.
And please stand if you're able. Of the things we think, say, or do, first, is it the truth? Second,
is it fair to all concern? Third, will it build goodwill and better friendships? Fourth, will it be
beneficial to all concerned? And fifth, is it fun?