Nominee for U.S. Attorney Faces Doubts About Postville Role

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa has nominated Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose for the position of U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa.  This nomination is getting some much-deserved pushback based on Rose's participation in the railroad justice last year following the ICE raid at the Agriprocessors plant at Postville.

I have nothing against Rose on a personal level; I'm sure she's a dedicated public servant and by her colleagues' accounts, a great coworker.  But I do have a problem with her taking over as U.S. Attorney after her role in the national shame of the Postville legal proceedings last year.

Here are some of the due process problems with the Postville proceedings noted in this article:

Denying adequate legal representation by assigning as many as 17 defendants to an attorney; the breakdown of separation of powers when Chief Judge Linda R. Reade participated in ex-parte communications by approving plea agreements and moving the court an hour north to Waterloo without the defense's knowledge; and the use of aggressive plea agreements that expired after seven days.

These shady actions were designed to exploit the cracks between the immigration and criminal justice systems to put the defendants in an impossible position: take the pleas arranged by the public defenders, the judge, and the prosecution, serve five months in prison, get deported and never come back OR take the risk of a two year jail sentence with the same consequences at the end.  Meanwhile, your family in Guatemala starves.

Postville migrants were begging to be released to go support their families in Guatemala.  But Rose and the other prosecutors colluded with the federal judge to ram these cases through before anyone could raise an effective defense.

Rose doesn't see the Postville cases as a liability, but rather as a success story.

Executing the massive operation required amazing efforts and a "ton of good work," she said, though she expects to be grilled on the matter if she faces Congress during a confirmation hearing.

Anyone who is proud of what happened at Postville shouldn't have a license to practice law, much less get a promotion out of it.

Rose said any criticisms over the court proceedings at National Cattle Congress have come from people outside the process.

First of all, that's not true-Erik Camayd-Freixas was a federal interpreter at Postville so upset by what he saw that he blew the whistle on the sham proceedings.

Second, Rose and her colleagues worked to close off the process to anyone who might have slowed it down, like immigration attorneys who actually understood the consequences of what the public defenders were advising their clients--all 17 of them per attorney--to do.  So her complaint that any criticism came from outside the process is disingenuous at best.

She noted no public defenders who represented clients in the case have expressed such grave concerns.

That may in part be because the PDs didn't come out of this smelling like roses.  Many probably didn't at the time understood the harsh consequences of their advice and don't seem to have done much good for their clients, the vast majority of whom were deported after serving five months in prison.  Most of those clients will not be able to come back to the U.S. anytime soon, if at all, regardless of their U.S. citizen family members left behind.  Representation on these kinds of criminal charges by lawyers who know nothing about immigration law is not adequate representation, and Rose did not serve the interests of justice by exploiting that knowledge gap in order to chalk up more victories for her promotion.  Each tally for her represented a life destroyed or a family broken.

Marcelo Ballvé recently wrote in Mother Jones about how the Agriprocessors raid has devastated the town of Postville.  You can see the consequences on small towns like Postville of the decades-long, bipartisan effort to criminalize immigration, an approach completely untethered from fairness or proportionality.  This type of work should be condemned rather than rewarded.

(Via ImmigrationProf Blog)