More Charges of Misconduct in Immigration Detention Centers

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The disregard for due process in Georgia, which has the country’s third-largest docket and respondents from across the country, is a national catastrophe—although the effects are personal to Logan Guzman, a 3-year-old who for more than a year has missed the affection of his father, Pedro, because Cassidy is resisting a recommendation from the Board of Immigration Appeals to grant Pedro bond based on his close ties to US citizens. (Cassidy turned this around, ruling that these close ties would make Pedro a flight risk and held him even though Guzman had a slam-dunk case on the merits.) Fogle, Guzman’s attorney, says, “That’s the logic of someone who wants to keep somebody in jail no matter what, to make them give up on their case and leave. That’s this whole system, not just [Cassidy]. It’s a strategy used by the DHS. You don’t give someone a bond or give them a high bond, and they’ll give up on their case and just leave.” [...]

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Protecting misconduct is old news at the EOIR, which has been receiving complaints about Cassidy for years, including in the late 1990s from David Farshy, an attorney who attracted Cassidy’s ire for protesting his due process violations. In one case, Cassidy left a message on Farshy’s answering machine revealing an unlawful private conversation with the government’s attorney and stating that he had decided Farshy’s client’s case before the hearing. Rather than fire Cassidy for these flagrant violations, the agency hired the government attorney with whom he’d had the conversation—Sease, now an Atlanta adjudicator who attracts her own misconduct complaints.