Immigration judges ‘muzzled’ from speaking publicly by DOJ amid historic 3M-case backlog

 Immigration judges have been put under a gag order by the Department of Justice (DOJ), stopping them from talking publicly amid an unprecedented 3 million cases waiting to be heard in courts.

The National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) said its members need to get prior approval from the DOJ to speak, per orders from the department’s manager, Chief Immigration Judge Sheila McNulty.

The union had previously been outspoken amid record numbers of migrants arriving at the border and filing claims in immigration courts, overwhelming the already strained system.

Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, an umbrella organization supporting the NAIJ, told The Post the order is unprecedented.

4

An officer directs people to a courtroom in an immigration court in Miami. AP

“They’ve never been muzzled before,” Biggs said.

“They speak on behalf of the nation’s immigration judges, and they have a very, very critical and important perspective to share with the public with the press and with the Congress.

“Now, all of a sudden, out of the blue, their management at the Executive Office of Immigration Review put a muzzle on them,” Biggs said.

As of December, there were 682 federal immigration judges, each with a caseload of around 4,500, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Judges are typically able to complete around 750 cases a year. The backlog of cases has increased from just over 500,000 in September 2016 to over 3 million in November 2023, according to the clearinghouse.

4

Judge Mimi Tsankov participates in a Zoom interview.LinkedIn

Former immigration Judge Matt O’Brien, who now serves as director of investigations at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, told The Post: “The NAIJ has long advocated judicial independence for the immigration bench.

“However, this administration wants a compliant immigration judge workforce that will find a reason to approve any cases assigned to it. As a result, the Department of Justice has a vested interest in prohibiting the NAIJ from drawing public attention to flaws in that approach.”

In October, New York-based Judge Mimi Tsankov, who serves as the NAIJ’s president, testified to a Senate committee that some of the blame for the growing immigration court case backlog lies with the DOJ for its “inability to effectively lead.”

Tsankov pointed to the DOJ lacking “the institutional expertise to manage an independent court,” adding that it “routinely interjected into the adjudicatory functions of the immigration court system itself.”

Tsankov and NAIJ executive vice president Samuel Cole, an immigration judge in Chicago, were also able to speak publicly about “the pressures of the migrant crisis on the federal immigration court system” at the National Press Club in October last year.

4

Migrants lined up at the border in El Paso, Texas, to be processed after illegally crossing into the US in February.AFP via Getty Images

4

Chief Immigration Judge Sheila McNultycovenanthouseil.org

Tsankov declined to comment when reached by The Post, saying: “Following the receipt of an email [from] chief immigration judge Sheila McNulty on February 15, I’m not permitted to participate in writing or speaking engagements, including interviews, in my capacity as President of the National Association of immigration judges, without supervisory approval.”

The Executive Office for Immigration Review didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

The Trump administration took away the collective bargaining rights of the NAIJ, which was founded in 1971 as an association. In 1979, the NAIJ received its union status.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/immigration-judges-muzzled-from-speaking-publicly-by-doj/

'Almost no NYC migrants are accepting free plane, bus tickets after shelter evictions'

 Less than 2% of adult migrants per day are accepting free plane or bus tickets to leave the Big Apple once they are booted from the city’s overflowing shelter system, newly released data shows.

Of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers who flock to the city’s East Village intake center each day, an average of just 30 per day have been willing to relocate to another city or state, according to data obtained by Gothamist from the city’s emergency management agency.

In September, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration cut the time that adult migrants can stay at city-run shelters to 30 days, in a bid to free up space in the already overburdened system.

As a result, hundreds of adult migrants have for months been flooding the intake center — located at the former St. Brigid School on East 7th Street.

Of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers who have gone to an intake center in the East Village when their 30-day shelter stay expired, an average of 2% are accepting a free plane or bus ticket, data shows.J. Messerschmidt for NY Post

Once there, the migrants can either re-apply for taxpayer-funded temporary housing, which could see them sent to hotels upstate — or take up the offer of a free one-way bus or plane ticket.

The data, collected between Dec. 17 to March 3, shows that just 15% of the migrants, on average, were able to secure another bed after trying to re-enter the shelter system at the East Village intake center after getting their 30-day eviction notice.

The city has so far coughed up $7.6 million to reticket migrants out of the Big Apple since spring 2022, a City Hall spokesperson told The Post.

The top destinations include other parts of New York state, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Hundreds of adult migrants have for months been flooding the intake center — located at the former St. Brigid School on East 7th Street — after the city started capping the time a single adult migrant can remain in a shelter.Kevin C. Downs for NY Post

It wasn’t immediately clear how much of that $7.6 million has been forked out at the East Village center. Asylum seekers can also get reticketed at other shelters, including the city’s main Roosevelt Hotel intake center. The data for the other reticketing sites was not immediately available.

City officials, however, insist that roughly 60% of the migrants who have come through the Big Apple’s shelter system since spring 2022 — or about 113,000 — have already “taken the next steps in their journeys.” This includes asylum seekers who are no longer in the city’s care because they either support themselves or left using their own means.

“We’re laser-focused on using intensive case management, reticketing, and legal support to help more people move out of shelter as they desire more self-sufficient lives,” the City Hall rep told The Post.

“While we are grateful for the assistance we have received thus far from our federal partners, we need more. We need the federal government to finish the job they started by providing more asylum seekers with expedited work authorization, sending additional financial support to New York City, and implementing a comprehensive decompression and resettlement strategy.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/less-than-2-of-nyc-migrants-are-accepting-free-plane-bus-tickets-after-shelter-eviction/

E-bike theft crew terrorizes NYC food delivery workers, stabs one man in stickup

 An armed crew terrorized Manhattan food delivery workers in a spree where they stole seven e-bikes – and stabbed one worker during a botched stick-up, authorities said.

Several suspects — seen in images released by the NYPD Monday — flashed guns, knives and razor blades in the 11-day spree across Harlem where they targeted at least nine victims, cops said.

Eight of the victims were confirmed to be delivery workers, and seven of them lost their bikes to the thieving crew, police said. 

The 11-day series of crimes, spanned both East and West Harlem, from East 109th Street near Madison Avenue to West 141st Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, cops said.NYPD

In the most violent case, two suspects approached a 41-year-old man making a delivery on West 131st Street near Seventh Avenue around 9:45 p.m. Feb. 29, cops said.

The pair flashed a knife, stabbed the worker in the left upper back and tried to grab his cellphone before taking off, authorities said.

The suspects fled empty-handed, cops said.

The victim was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition.

The suspects have been connected to three e-bike robberies from that same evening, cops said.

In one case, six crooks – one of them armed with a knife – got in on the action, snatching an e-bike, delivery bag and cellphone from a 30-year-old worker on West 124th Street near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd, around 7 p.m., authorities said.

The crew used guns, knives and razor blades during the crimes, cops said.NYPD

Three muggers ambushed a 24-year-old man delivering food on West 130th Street near Fifth Avenue around 8:50 p.m. – one of them pushing him and grabbing his bike, while another placed a knife against his stomach, cops said.

One of the suspects also grabbed the delivery man’s cellphone and $120, police said. 

Minutes after 10 p.m. the same night, the crew struck again, allegedly flashed a gun and a knife before they stole an e-bike from a 31-year-old man at  West 141st Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, cops said. 

The victim, whose occupation is unclear, was treated for minor injuries at the scene.

Earlier armed robberies took place on Feb. 28, 22, 21 and 19, cops said.

The earliest stick-up, from around midnight Feb. 19, saw the crew use razor blades as a weapon, cops said.

Two armed suspects ripped an e-bike away from a 21-year-old man on East 110th Street near Third Avenue in that case, cops said.

It’s unclear whether that victim, who was not physically harmed, was a delivery driver.

Anyone with information on the cases is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782).  

The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at https://crimestoppers.nypdonline.org/, or on X @NYPDTips.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/11/us-news/e-bike-stealing-crew-terrorizes-nyc-food-delivery-workers-stabs-one-man-in-stickup-cops/

Fauci Deputy Warned Him Against Vaccine Mandates

 by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Mandating COVID-19 vaccination was a mistake due to ethical and other concerns, a top government doctor warned Dr. Anthony Fauci after Dr. Fauci promoted mass vaccination.

“Coercing or forcing people to take a vaccine can have negative consequences from a biological, sociological, psychological, economical, and ethical standpoint and is not worth the cost even if the vaccine is 100% safe,” Dr. Matthew Memoli, director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases clinical studies unit at the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told Dr. Fauci in an email.

“A more prudent approach that considers these issues would be to focus our efforts on those at high risk of severe disease and death, such as the elderly and obese, and do not push vaccination on the young and healthy any further.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, ex-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID. in Washington on Jan. 8, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

Employing that strategy would help prevent loss of public trust and political capital, Dr. Memoli said.

The email was sent on July 30, 2021, after Dr. Fauci, director of the NIAID, claimed that communities would be safer if more people received one of the COVID-19 vaccines and that mass vaccination would lead to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re on a really good track now to really crush this outbreak, and the more people we get vaccinated, the more assuredness that we’re going to have that we’re going to be able to do that,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN the month prior.

Dr. Memoli, who has studied influenza vaccination for years, disagreed, telling Dr. Fauci that research in the field has indicated yearly shots sometimes drive the evolution of influenza.

Vaccinating people who have not been infected with COVID-19, he said, could potentially impact the evolution of the virus that causes COVID-19 in unexpected ways.

“At best what we are doing with mandated mass vaccination does nothing and the variants emerge evading immunity anyway as they would have without the vaccine,” Dr. Memoli wrote. “At worst it drives evolution of the virus in a way that is different from nature and possibly detrimental, prolonging the pandemic or causing more morbidity and mortality than it should.”

The vaccination strategy was flawed because it relied on a single antigen, introducing immunity that only lasted for a certain period of time, Dr. Memoli said. When the immunity weakened, the virus was given an opportunity to evolve.

Some other experts, including virologist Geert Vanden Bossche, have offered similar views. Others in the scientific community, such as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists, say vaccination prevents virus evolution, though the agency has acknowledged it doesn’t have records supporting its position.

Other Messages

Dr. Memoli sent the email to Dr. Fauci and two other top NIAID officials, Drs. Hugh Auchincloss and Clifford Lane. The message was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, though the publication did not publish the message. The Epoch Times obtained the email and 199 other pages of Dr. Memoli’s emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. There were no indications that Dr. Fauci ever responded to Dr. Memoli.

Later in 2021, the NIAID’s parent agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and all other federal government agencies began requiring COVID-19 vaccination, under direction from President Joe Biden.

In other messages, Dr. Memoli said the mandates were unethical and that he was hopeful legal cases brought against the mandates would ultimately let people “make their own healthcare decisions.”

“I am certainly doing everything in my power to influence that,” he wrote on Nov. 2, 2021, to an unknown recipient. Dr. Memoli also disclosed that both he and his wife had applied for exemptions from the mandates imposed by the NIH and his wife’s employer. While her request had been granted, his had not as of yet, Dr. Memoli said. It’s not clear if it ever was.

According to Dr. Memoli, officials had not gone over the bioethics of the mandates. He wrote to the NIH’s Department of Bioethics, pointing out that the protection from the vaccines waned over time, that the shots can cause serious health issues such as myocarditis, or heart inflammation, and that vaccinated people were just as likely to spread COVID-19 as unvaccinated people.

He cited multiple studies in his emails, including one that found a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in a California health care system despite a high rate of vaccination and another that showed transmission rates were similar among the vaccinated and unvaccinated.

Dr. Memoli said he was “particularly interested in the bioethics of a mandate when the vaccine doesn’t have the ability to stop spread of the disease, which is the purpose of the mandate.”

The message led to Dr. Memoli speaking during an NIH event in December 2021, several weeks after he went public with his concerns about mandating vaccines.

“Vaccine mandates should be rare and considered only with a strong justification,” Dr. Memoli said in the debate. He suggested that the justification was not there for COVID-19 vaccines, given their fleeting effectiveness.

Julie Ledgerwood, another NIAID official who also spoke at the event, said that the vaccines were highly effective and that the side effects that had been detected were not significant. She did acknowledge that vaccinated people needed boosters after a period of time.

The NIH, and many other government agencies, removed their mandates in 2023 with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

A request for comment from Dr. Fauci was not returned. Dr. Memoli told The Epoch Times in an email he was “happy to answer any questions you have” but that he needed clearance from the NIAID’s media office. That office then refused to give clearance.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University, said that Dr. Memoli showed bravery when he warned Dr. Fauci against mandates.

“Those mandates have done more to demolish public trust in public health than any single action by public health officials in my professional career, including diminishing public trust in all vaccines.” Dr. Bhattacharya, a frequent critic of the U.S. response to COVID-19, told The Epoch Times via email. “It was risky for Dr. Memoli to speak publicly since he works at the NIH, and the culture of the NIH punishes those who cross powerful scientific bureaucrats like Dr. Fauci or his former boss, Dr. Francis Collins.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/fauci-deputy-warned-him-against-vaccine-mandates-email

Insurer Delays and Denials Hamper Patients Seeking At-Home Ventilators

 Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) took away Grace Armant's ability to speak, but the 84-year-old still has plenty to say about her insurance.

UnitedHealthcare has rejected several requests from her doctors for coverage of a machine Armant needs to breathe as she deals with the fatal illness.

"They are no good," Armant said, typing slowly into a device that speaks for her. "I can't do without the machine."

Doctors around the country say UnitedHealthcare and other insurers have made it harder to get coverage for certain home ventilators that patients like Armant need as their lungs fail. They say patients often must struggle first with less effective -- and cheaper -- devices before some insurers will pay. In other cases, insurers balk at paying for a second machine needed when patients transfer from their bed to a wheelchair.

Temple University doctoral student Jaggar DeMarco waited more than 3 years to get his.

"Breathing is not a luxury," he said. "It's really the bare minimum, and that's what we're asking for."

Some physicians believe insurers are making it harder on patients because more of the devices are being prescribed. Spending by the federal government's Medicare program on the ventilators jumped from about $3 million to nearly $269 million between 2009 and 2017, according to the HHS Office of Inspector General.

Insurers say they do cover the machines, but that coverage can depend on several factors.

These "noninvasive" ventilators help patients breathe around the clock by forcing air into the lungs, often through a mask. They are called noninvasive because they don't require trachea surgery to open the airway, like ones used in hospitals.

The machines have battery backups so they can keep working when the power goes out. They also are more powerful than other devices meant to be used mainly at night for conditions like sleep apnea. At around $1,200 a month, they can be three times as expensive as those devices.

These ventilators can help prolong the life of someone with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, doctors say.

But insurance rejections have picked up for those patients and people dealing with advanced cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said Chuck Coolidge, chief strategy officer for VieMed, which provides respiratory equipment for patients in 46 states.

That includes both initial approvals and reauthorizations, he said.

"In early 2023, it was almost like a switch flipped," he said.

UnitedHealthcare spokeswoman Heather Soule said her company covers the machines and re-evaluates requests if it gets new information. Coverage can depend on the patient's condition, terms of their health plan, or guidelines from the federal government's Medicare program.

Those guidelines give insurers room to reject many ventilator requests, even those for seriously ill patients, said John Hansen-Flaschen, MD, a pulmonary medicine expert with the University of Pennsylvania.

Government-funded Medicare Advantage plans run by UnitedHealthcare now deny nearly all initial requests for the ventilators, said Cathy Lomen-Hoerth, MD, PhD, a neurologist with the University of California San Francisco.

In West Virginia, Dale Harper says it took several months and a personal plea before UnitedHealthcare would cover a ventilator for his 25-year-old son, Jacob, who has a rare and aggressive form of ALS.

After appeals from Jacob's doctor failed, Harper called a number on his insurance card and asked for a supervisor.

"I said, 'I can feed him, I can help him go to the bathroom, I can move him from one place to the other,'" the Winfield, West Virginia, resident recalled. "The only thing I cannot do is breathe for him ... and he can't breathe."

Harper said ventilator coverage was approved within an hour of that call early last year.

Doctors caring for Armant, who lives outside New Orleans, say they usually get decent ventilator coverage.

"No one thought there would be a problem," said Deidre Devier, PhD, a Louisiana State University Health experimental psychologist who specializes in cognitive disorders.

They first sought coverage in May, 2022, and Devier said Armant has only had it for around 3 months near the end of that year. She said a medical device company has been providing Armant's ventilator for free while her case was appealed. But those appeals have ended.

Armant's daughter said she's considering starting hospice care, which would allow for ventilator coverage but prevent her mom from seeing her regular doctors. She's also looking online for a refurbished machine.

"She doesn't have $20,000" to buy the machine, Terrellyn Armant said.

Representatives of both patients with UnitedHealthcare coverage gave the insurer written permission to discuss their cases, but Soule declined to comment on the record.

Coverage complications aren't limited to UnitedHealthcare. DeMarco, the Temple student, said Aetna denied a request for a second breathing machine, and then several appeals. Eventually, his father's employer essentially overruled the insurer and allowed coverage.

Doctors recommend a second ventilator for people who use wheelchairs during the day. That avoids mistakes in adjusting the machine's settings when moving someone from their bed.

"I'm constantly angry that my life and what I can do with (it) is sometimes determined by insurance companies and bureaucracy," said the 30-year-old DeMarco, who has chronic respiratory failure.

An Aetna representative said the company could not comment on individual cases. But he added that Aetna does cover second ventilators in certain circumstances. Aetna's policy bulletin says they are medically necessary for people who need an additional ventilator for their wheelchair during the day.

Ventilator coverage problems started picking up after technology improvements made the devices easier to use, according to Lisa Wolfe, MD, a professor at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine. That led to a rise in use for patients with conditions that are not immediately life-threatening.

She said she thinks insurers are reacting to that expanded use.

ALS patients without ventilator access have limited options. They can use a device that's covered but doesn't work as well. They may get ventilator coverage by entering hospice care or having a tracheostomy.

They also might wind up bouncing in and out of hospitals, said Hansen-Flaschen, the Penn physician.

"Or they die prematurely, and it's a wretched death because they can't breathe," he said.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/pulmonology/generalpulmonary/109106