SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 51and the Department of Homeland Security.
(Asylum seekers are not guaranteed an at-
torney.) 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 im-
migration 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 de-
serving of asylum: “She’s entering the situa-
tion with the intention to prove that they’re
not.” dhs prosecutors remain almost en-
tirely 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.
Reese’s fiefdom in Oakdale lies about
200 miles from both Houston and New
Orleans. The former lumber town’s main
industry these days is incarceration. Along
with cells for more than 2,000 inmates at
two low-security federal prisons, there is
room for more than 1,000 immigration
detainees at the Pine Prairie ice Process-
ing Center, a razor wire–wrapped fortress
run by the geo Group, the nation’s largest
private prison company. The Oakdale im-
migration court is located at the back of
one of the low-security prisons.
On a weekday morning in June, immi-
gration attorneys Rachel Chappell and
Christopher Kinnison were waiting in the
court’s small lobby, overseen by two geo
guards. When Chappell told Kinnison that
she was there for an asylum hearing with
Judge Reese, Kinnison half-joked that the
only point of showing up was to hope that
Reese made a mistake that justified an
appeal. Kinnison, one of the few immi-
gration attorneys based near Oakdale, had
never argued an asylum case before Reese.
“I tell all of my potential clients who have
her that they will lose their asylum case,” he
says, “and that they shouldn’t pay me thou-
sands of dollars for them to get the same
result.” (Oakdale immigration judge Johnny
Duck, a 69-year-old white Reagan adminis-
tration appointee who sometimes removes
his prosthetic leg during hearings, grants a
relatively charitable 16 percent of claims. A
third judge started there last year, but his
case record is not yet publicly available.)
Chappell’s client that morning, Simranjit
Singh, a 22-year-old Sikh from India, did
not give her much to work with. Asylum
seekers without convincing claims are
sometimes coached by smugglers to tell
stories designed to improve their odds,
and Singh’s tale was a familiar one. In the
lobby, Kinnison correctly guessed its details,
down to the number of beatings Singh had
allegedly suffered at the hands of members
of India’s main opposition party.
Singh appeared in Reese’s court in anorange jumpsuit and a navy blue turban.
He remained shackled at the ankles, waist,
and wrists throughout the hearing and
struggled to manipulate the handcuffs
when Reese asked him to sign a form. Reese
appeared in a black robe. Her courtroom’s
walls were bare aside from the seal of the
Justice Department, which runs the na-
tion’s immigration courts.
When it came time to question Singh,
the government prosecutor, Michael
Smith, made a few inquiries about Singh’s
passport before turning things over to
Reese. The judge picked apart Singh’s story
for the next 40 minutes. She appeared in-
credulous that Singh’s travel to the United
States, which cost his family about $30,000,
had been arranged by an uncle. “You are
an adult, correct?” she asked. After a brief
recess, Reese took a swig from a coffeemug before dictating her denial of Singh’s
asylum request to the court reporter, down
to every semicolon. When advised of his
right to appeal, Singh began shaking his
head to signal that he didn’t want to.
It’s not that Reese doesn’t believe ev-
eryone who appears before her; it’s that
she believes almost nobody. Immigration
judges may decide that an asylum seeker
told the truth but doesn’t face enough risk
back home to justify being granted asylum.
But Reese usually rules that asylees’ stories
aren’t credible, according to eight attor-
neys who have appeared before her. That
can make it nearly impossible to overturn
her decisions, since the conservative 5th Cir-
cuit Court of Appeals grants judges in the
South extreme deference when it comes to
evaluating asylees’ honesty. (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.)
Abraham was no exception. After Reese
found his story of persecution in Eritrea not
credible, his appeal failed in October. But he
was luckier than most asylum seekers who
go before Reese: His home country refused
to take him back. So in late June, after 20
months of imprisonment, ice was forced to
release him. He is a free man—for now. ice
knows where he lives and can arrest him if
Eritrea allows him to be deported.
He still struggles to make sense of how
he ended up before Reese. “I ran away from
dictator in my country,” he says in English.
“I come to face a dictator in a courtroom in
America?” But he doesn’t wish her ill. The
book of Matthew, he says, tells Christians
to “love your enemy...and pray for those
who persecute you.”
The Gospel, Abraham says, “was talking
about Judge Reese. I never hated her. I
prayed for her heart to come back.”
Tonka, the Cameroonian asylum seeker,
who fled to India after being deported, ex-
presses the same sentiment. He prays that
“God will touch her heart, if she’s a human
being,” and he hopes that Reese will one
day “think about the lives that she has de-
stroyed.” She now has plenty of time to
reflect on her unbroken streak of denials:
Nine days after I visited her courtroom,
Reese stepped down from the bench after
22 years. For the asylum seekers at Oakdale,
any change of heart would come too late. QJUDGE DREADSTATE OF DENIAL
US asylum decisions, 2001–2018010K20K30K40K50K QAsylum denied
QAsylum granted’01 ’04 ’07 ’10 ’13 ’16Source: TRAC, Syracuse University