Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale: There is No Protection of Non-Detained Docket from Pretermission
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO IMMIGRANTS IN PLAIN SIGHT IN MINNEAPOLIS AND NJ (6,000+ DETAINED) IS HORRIBLE…WHAT IS HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES IN IMMIGRATION COURTS (AND BEFORE FOLKS EVEN GET TO COURT) IS NAUSEATING AND UNCHECKED AND COULD LEAD TO A HUNDRED THOUSAND DEPORTATIONS FROM NJ AND 7.5 MILLION NATIONALLY.
THERE ARE NO RAPID RESPONSE TEAMS, OR NEIGHBORHOOD WATCHES, OR SANCTUARY PLANS, OR CAMERA CREWS THAT ARE SET TO PROTECTION PEOPLE IN THE NON-DETAINED DOCKET FROM PRETERMISSION.
IT’S A WHOLE NEW WAY TO CARRY OUT RACIAL AND ETHNIC CLEANSING. CAN I BEG YOU, DEAR FRIENDS, TO START LEARNING ABOU THIS? CAN I BEG YOU TO START TALKING TO MEDIA OUTLETS ABOUT THIS?
What is pretermission? I am not an immigration attorney, and up until this week I’d never heard the term.
This week a woman who arrived in our lives in Central NJ, humanely released by Immigration from Elizabeth detention center in 2022, after flying into the country from Africa (I’m not sharing which country out of extreme caution) and claiming asylum at JFK, learned that the government was “pretermitting” her case and seeking to deport her to Uganda. She’s never been to Uganda, has no connections, and the country is nowhere near her home country.
Google tells me “Pretermission of an asylum application is a procedural mechanism where an Immigration Judge (IJ) denies or dismisses a claim without a full evidentiary hearing. Based on 2025 BIA decisions and EOIR policy, IJs may pretermit cases that fail to meet legal requirements, are incomplete, or are subject to mandatory bars (e.g., Safe Third Country Agreements).
Safe Third Country Agreements or Asylum Cooperative Agreements are flimsy deals that the first Trump Admin started, and that Biden suspended, and Trump II started up again in full.
With these agreements Trump’s admin. pays off usually small and poor countries (Eswatini, El Salvador, Honduras, Uganda) to take deportees, promising not to persecute them. But who is checking? And, who says the populations sent there will fit in? Are they eligible for services? How will they survive?
Answer from Trump’s admin.? “So what. Why should I care?”
The idea is, “Ok, you left country X, you want to be safe from X, we don’t want you here in the USA, so we are not sending you back to X, but we’ll kindly send you to Y.”
In other words, the U.S. government is determining the future location of where an asylum seeker should be, sending people to countries and places that often have dubious records of human rights abuses and are ‘senders’ of global refugees themselves.
In NJ, in the non-detained docket, there are about 100,000 people who have been living and working and contributing and supporting their families and communities and being part of our lives. They have been waiting for their turn to present their case in court. Now, for my friend, on the day when the “Master Calendar Hearing is held,” rather than that being the exciting day to find out the timeline for when her case might be considered (months or years out) instead, she’s been told “the government actually has decided, without hearing your case, that they won’t grant you anything and they are taking it upon themselves to send you elsewhere.”
If the Trump Admin had a deep desire to reform immigration I would have loved to talk with them. I have been concerned about “violent, militaristic, capitalist push factors” that led to massive movements of people since I read Penny Lernoux’s “Cry of the People” (’82, but I read it in ’96) and “Ghost Wars” by Steve Coll in 2005. Currently in the middle of “Everyone who is Gone is Here” by Jonathan Blitzer I am further convinced of all the ways of sins of abuse, practiced around the world, have led to the ‘crises’ of immigration.
Trump, you could have had a meaningful discussion about immigration Reform. It’s beyond time to really understand things.
Instead, you shat on any sort of meaningful political power you might have had to create a better world and instead emphasized your racist, xenophobic, brutal, uncaring, insecure, pitiful, self-loathing features. What a waste you are. And my friend from Africa being threatened with 3rd country placement in Uganda, and hundreds of thousands in the non-detained docket (ie, people who the public just knows as ‘my neighbor’) are the newest group to bear the brunt of your foul-side.
peace, seth
