Biden wants to expand immigrants’ access to legal representation.
Deportation can carry grave consequences. An immigrant might have to leave behind their family, abandon years-long ties to their community, and return to a country where they may have previously faced threats to their life and livelihood — even the kind that might have qualified them for humanitarian protection in the US had they been able to prove it.
But despite those potential costs, they aren’t entitled to a lawyer when facing deportation proceedings in immigration court. The Constitution’s Sixth Amendment, which guarantees a public defender to anyone accused of a crime, doesn’t apply.
The Biden administration is looking to address this. Last month, the president signed a presidential memorandum aimed at expanding access to legal representation and the courts, including for low-income people, immigrants, and asylum seekers. While details of the plan are short, he has asked the Justice Department to restart its access to justice work, which was on hiatus during the Trump administration, and convened a roundtable of civil legal aid organizations to advise him.
But the Biden administration need not look far for potential solutions: The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, a first-of-its-kind program that provides publicly funded lawyers to every detained or incarcerated immigrant in the state, offers a helpful model.
The project started with a $500,000 grant from the New York City Council in 2013, and was based out of a single immigration court in lower Manhattan. Now the program receives $16.6 million in public funding to support more than 100 staff, including attorneys, paralegals, social workers, and administrators who work to improve outcomes for immigrants statewide.
Advocates and experts say the New York project has since inspired similar local efforts around the country.
“New York City is a great story where it started with a relatively small pilot project only trying to represent a fraction of the population, but then being able to expand on that at the state level after demonstrating success,” said Annie Chen, program director of the Vera Institute’s SAFE Initiative, which works with governments, legal service providers, and advocates to push for universal representation. “The last couple of years, local and state government have been innovating and setting up these types of programs that are really paving the way for federal action.”
Biden now has an opportunity to take advantage of that momentum.
How New York created a model for universal representation
New York was the first state to recognize the importance of providing universal representation to immigrants in detention, and it has since inspired similar state and local initiatives nationwide. There are now 43 publicly funded local and state deportation defense programs nationwide within 11 states, from Harris County, Texas, to Prince George’s County, Maryland.
It started with Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, who convened a group of lawyers to study the issue in 2011 after noticing that many of the immigrants who came before him in the appeals court lost out on potential opportunities for deportation relief because they didn’t have a lawyer to guide them.
The group came out with a report that found that nearly two-thirds of immigrants in New York were unrepresented, and just 3 percent of detained, unrepresented immigrants had successful outcomes. It also identified a dearth of legal talent available to fill that need.
The report was the catalyst for the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, which started out of the Varick Street immigration court in Manhattan.
Sarah Deri Oshiro, who is now managing director of the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders, had been working on deportation defense at Varick Street for five years prior to the implementation of the program. She saw a grim reality for detained, unrepresented immigrants, despite the city’s robust network of legal services organizations.
“Given the time- and resource-intensive nature of representing people who are in custody and litigating very complicated cases where the immigrant bears the burden of proof to win relief and the laws are stacked against them, people just didn’t have the resources to do much free detained deportation defense work,” she told me.
That changed in 2013. Lawyers from several nonprofits designated by the New York City council — Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, and the Legal Aid Society — chose a few days a week when they would take on every case where the individual had an income at least 200 percent below the poverty line, rather than just picking those that appeared likely to succeed.
That was an important statement to the city, private funders, and the community that an immigrant’s right to fight their case shouldn’t be based on whether they are qualified to stay in the US, said Deri Oshiro, who was part of the Bronx Defenders team that got the program off the ground. And it forced the lawyers to become better advocates.
“We were able to take on more challenging cases and really change the way that the judges interpret the law,” she said. “We were making new, better law.” They were also able to build credibility with government lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security and the immigration judges, as well as hold them accountable.
They didn’t take every case to trial — some people just didn’t qualify for any relief, and in those cases, they did not encourage false hope. In the first two years of the program, between 30 percent and 40 percent of their clients agreed to be deported at their first or second immigration court hearings, Deri Oshiro said.
That facilitated efficiency, which is critical, as the nation’s immigration courts currently face a backlog of more than 1.3 million cases that have been pending for an average of about two and a half years.
“I think that we got a lot of credibility as people who are not necessarily trying to derail the system all the time,” Deri Oshiro said.
But for those who did qualify for deportation relief, they were able to secure better outcomes. By 2017, the Vera Institute of Justice estimated a 48 percent success rate for immigrants in the program — a more than 1,000 percent increase from the success rate of immigrants at Varick Street prior to the program’s implementation. And immigrants in the program had been released from detention at almost twice the rate of unrepresented people at comparable immigration courts.
The program also helped sustain community and family ties. Clients had on average been living in the US for 16 years by the time they faced deportation and were parents to 1,859 children living in the US, the vast majority of whom had US citizenship or some other form of legal immigration status, according to the Vera Institute.
The program eventually expanded across New York City and, in 2015, to immigration courts based at three prisons upstate: the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, Ulster Correctional Facility in Napanoch, and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
Expanding into the prison system involved its own challenges, said Rosa Cohen-Cruz, who helped oversee the buildout as a senior immigration attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of New York. Immigrants were often brought to those courts for their hearings from other correctional facilities hours away, making it difficult for the attorneys to meet with their clients.
The cases were also by nature more difficult because immigrants held on criminal charges or who have criminal records are limited in their ability to be released and to get relief from deportation.
But today, there is full universal representation for all detained or incarcerated immigrants facing deportation in New York state.
“Our organizations are clearly committed to providing legal advocacy to people who’ve had the most serious criminal convictions that you can imagine,” Deri Oshiro said. “We still think that they deserve protection.”
Advocates say Biden should invest in public defender programs for immigrants
The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP) can serve as a model for other public deportation programs nationwide and for the Biden administration as it looks for federal solutions to the crisis of representation.
Many local governments already are starting to wade into deportation defense but could expand with more funding. That presents an immediate and pressing opportunity, said Jojo Annobil, executive director of Immigrant Justice Corps, which trains lawyers and advocates in deportation defense to support programs like NYIFUP across the US.
“The NYIFUP model is definitely scalable,” Annobil said. “Funding brings fairness and dignity to the system. I think we have an urgency here to do it right.”
In the past, the Vera Institute has partnered with places that had never had a deportation defense program before, starting with a public defender office that brings in lawyers with immigration defense expertise to build a program from the ground up. And programs have started as a collaboration among legal services providers and law school clinics.
But there were critical lessons from getting NYIFUP off the ground. A major challenge was convincing backers in the New York City Council that the lawyers couldn’t take on the same volume of clients as expected of public defenders in the criminal system. In the immigration courts, there isn’t a system of plea bargaining, and the burden of proof falls on the immigrant, rather than on the government. That increases the workload and limits how many cases they can pursue and how quickly they can resolve them.
“We were wildly underfunded for the amount of work that our staff was required to do for every client for a long time,” Deri Oshiro said. “I wouldn’t say that workload feels perfectly manageable now, even now that we’re much more robustly funded.”
In order to effectively argue cases, the program has come to rely not just on competent attorneys but also on a range of support staff: social workers, translators, administrators, interpreters, and mental health providers. All of them are necessary to building an effective case.
“I really saw the difference that that kind of staffing can make in helping navigate the myriad issues that lawyers don’t have expertise in,” Cohen-Cruz said.
Maintaining that level of staffing requires funding, and some of that money could come from the Biden administration, to ease pressure on local resources.
Deri Oshiro said it was also important that all the organizations involved in NYIFUP were public defender agencies, and not just civil immigration legal services organizations. As public defenders, they were accustomed to holding the government to their burden of proof — for example, to first prove that someone is, in fact, an undocumented immigrant from whatever country the government alleges, via evidence obtained lawfully, before seeking any relief from deportation. They also came from a culture where having contact with the criminal legal system doesn’t mean that someone is any less worthy of representation.
If the federal government were to implement a federal public defender system for deportation defense, it would have to ensure that it could attract competent lawyers to areas that don’t already have a robust network of deportation defense services. It’s possible that federal public defenders or even US Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorneys could become federal immigrant defenders, with the requisite funding and competitive salaries.
“If they fund it properly, I don’t think that the lack of local immigrant legal service expertise would be a hindrance,” Deri Oshiro said. “You have got to go big or go home.”
Countless websites, including major news outlets, were offline after an outage at Fastly, a cloud computing provider.
Swaths of websites went down on Tuesday morning after an outage at the cloud computing services provider Fastly. Internet users were unable to access major news outlets, e-commerce platforms, and even government websites. Everyone from Amazon to the New York Times to the White House was affected.
At around 6:30 am ET, Fastly said it applied a “fix” to the issue, and many of the websites that went down seemed to be working again as of 9 am ET. Still, the outage highlights how dependent, centralized, and susceptible the infrastructure supporting the internet — especially cloud computing providers that the average user doesn’t directly interact with — actually is. This is at least the third time in less than a year that a problem at a large cloud computing provider has led to countless websites and apps going dark.
Fastly is a content delivery network (CDN), which maintains a network of servers that transfer content quickly from websites to users. The company, which counts Shopify, Stripe, and countless media outlets as customers, promises “lightning fast delivery” and “advanced security.” The nature of such a network also means that problems can quickly spread and affect many of those customers at once. In the case of Tuesday’s incident, Fastly says it “identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions” around the globe. It took about two hours from the time the problem was identified until a fix was implemented.
At the moment, there’s no reason to suspect the outage was the result of a cyberattack. Still, the outage comes amid a slew of recent cyberincidents that have impacted everything from the global meat supply to a major oil pipeline in the United States.
It’s nevertheless clear that the outage caused momentary mayhem. The site Downdetector, which tracks complaints about website failures, shows a slew of sites received an uptick in complaints this morning, not only for media outlets like the New York Times and CNN but also for Reddit, Spotify, and Walt Disney World. Outages at payments systems like Stripe and e-commerce platforms like Shopify also suggest money could have been lost in transactions that didn’t go through, though it’s so far unclear if that’s the case.
All Vox Media websites, including this one, were offline for a half-hour. The Verge, which is owned by Vox Media, transitioned to offering its content on Google Docs before internet users swarmed the doc and started editing (editors accidentally left the page unrestricted). Kentik, an internet observability company, reported that the outage was responsible for a 75 percent drop in traffic from Fastly’s servers.
The scale of Tuesday’s outage — and the frequency of large outages like this one — is what’s really worrisome. Last July, connection issues between two of the data centers operated by Cloudflare ultimately took many sites, including Politico, League of Legends, and Discord, briefly offline. Then, a data-processing problem for Amazon Web Services last November caused problems for sites like the Chicago Tribune, the security camera company Ring, and Glassdoor. The Fastly outage shows the trend continuing, especially as most of the web remains increasingly dependent on cloud providers.
While the issue seems to be fixed for now, it will take some time to measure the damage caused by even a couple hours of downtime at a major cloud computing provider. And that leaves the world anxiously awaiting the next time this happens.
Why these outages feel like they’re getting worse
One of the reasons the Fastly outage seems so wide scale is that cloud computing service companies like Fastly are consolidating, leaving websites dependent on a shrinking number of providers. Even if there aren’t that many total outages, the fact that so many everyday sites rely on fewer cloud providers makes each individual outage feel pretty significant to an average internet user who just wanted to buy some stuff on Amazon and read the New York Times early Tuesday morning.
There are benefits to consolidation, explains Doug Madory, the head of internet analysis at the network monitoring company Kentik. For instance, a smaller number of cloud providers means it’s much easier to get those providers to deploy a particular security change. “The flip side is the liability [of] having a few megacompanies, whether they’re CDNs or other types of internet firms, responsible for a lot of our internet activities,” Madory told Recode.
In other words, when one of these megacompanies updates its systems and inadvertently causes an outage, the damage radius could be quite wide. This is what happened in 2011 when one of Amazon’s cloud computing systems, Elastic Block Store (EBS), crashed and brought Reddit, Quora, and Foursquare offline. After the incident, Amazon explained that engineers inadvertently caused technical problems that trickled down through its systems and caused the outage.
“You end up with these cascading failures,” explained Christopher Meiklejohn, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Software Research. “They’re difficult to debug. They’re stressful and difficult to resolve. And they can be very difficult to detect early on when you’re thinking about making that change, because the systems are so complex and they involve so many moving parts.”
Central to these challenges, Meiklejohn said, is the fact that these cloud computing systems can involve tens of thousands of servers deployed across the world. It’s very difficult for developers working on new changes to anticipate all the characteristics of the larger system, a scenario that makes it more likely for an error to occur when updates are finally implemented. Companies don’t always have the tools to detect these problems before they happen, though there’s growing research and effort into better solutions.
The Fastly outage also happened amid growing concerns about cybersecurity. Now, many are anxious for more details from Fastly — which markets itself as a dependable and speedy service — about how its systems went down. The outage serves as a reminder that the internet is built on increasingly complicated infrastructure, one that’s global and can potentially affect the sites and services of countless companies. That means little mistakes can have massive consequences.
Update, June 8, 2021, 3:15 pm ET: This piece has been updated with new information and analysis.
Tornado warnings often come minutes before disaster. Here’s what’s standing in the way of better forecasts.
Shortly after midnight on March 3, 2020, Moe Odhwani woke up to find his cellphone buzzing violently beside him. The screen told him that a tornado was nearing his home in East Nashville, Tennessee. In the past, these alerts had never amounted to much — but he took shelter in the garage just to be safe.
It was a good thing he did. About seven to 10 minutes after the warning, the tornado howled over the area with winds in excess of 130 miles per hour. “The whole building started to shake,” says Odhwani, a 32-year-old who works in logistics. He worried that he wouldn’t survive: “Just, like, ‘This is it? This is how I’m going out?’”
Odhwani stayed safe, but the storm in the area killed 25 people that night. Thinking back on how little warning he had, he says, “Seven or 10 minutes is definitely not enough time.”
Tornadoes are some of the most deadly and damaging weather on Earth. The next day, “it was like a bomb went off in East Nashville,” Odhwani says. “Everything was destroyed.” Yet people in harm’s way are only given minutes to take cover from winds that can surpass 250 or even 300 mph.
This is one of the most frustrating, stagnant problems in meteorology. As of 2011, the average lead time for tornado warnings was just around 13 minutes. But as the Washington Post has reported, lead times have been getting worse in recent years, dropping to 8.4 minutes between 2012 and 2020. Some people have even less warning. (Odhwani says he didn’t hear the city’s warning sirens, and might have kept sleeping if his phone wasn’t nearby.) Think about it: If you had less than a quarter of an hour to prepare for devastation, what could you accomplish?
The truth is that those minutes of warning actually represent an improvement. “If you look back into the ’50s, even as late as the ’70s or the ’80s, tornadoes … they kind of came out of nowhere,” says Jeff Weber, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. In 1990, the average lead time was five minutes.
Between 1990 and 2019, tornadoes killed, on average, 68 people per year, according to the National Weather Service. Tornadoes can also cause billions of dollars’ worth of damage in any given year.
The lack of progress on tornado warnings is frustrating considering just how good meteorologists have gotten at predicting other severe weather, including hurricanes. In 2019, the National Hurricane Center’s predictions three days in advance of a storm were more accurate than its predictions one day in advance of a storm in 1990.
When tornado warnings do come, an actual twister may not follow. The vast majority of tornado warnings issued by the National Weather Service prove to be false alarms; in some years, the false alarm rate can be as high as 70 to 80 percent. Tornado forecasting hasn’t improved much since the 2011 tornado disaster in Joplin, Missouri, killed 162 people.
Tornado predictions are clearly an unresolved problem in meteorology. But weather researchers are optimistic they can solve it.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that in 100 years from now, we’ll probably be able to have a far greater accuracy for warning communities when a tornado is going to literally drop out of the sky,” Weber says.
To do that, scientists will need to confront these storms head-on — and start to solve the mystery of how they form.
Why forecasting tornadoes is so hard
Why is it so hard to predict when a tornado is going to touch down?
Scientists know tornadoes mainly form out of huge, violent “supercell” thunderstorms, which are particularly violent storms that rotate as if they were mini hurricanes. These storms are particularly common in the middle and southeastern portions of the United States, where moist, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico meets dry air from the Mountain West and Southwest. They’re especially likely to form during the spring and early summer.
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The problem is that meteorologists can look at two supercell thunderstorms that seem identical, and only one of them will produce a tornado. “Why is not well understood,” Amy McGovern, a meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma, says.
This is also why the false alarm rate for tornado warnings is so high: Forecasters just can’t easily tell when a storm that looks like it could produce a tornado actually will.
Scientists do understand the ingredients that go into creating the type of supercell storms that produce the most violent tornadoes.
Check out Vox’s video on why the central US spawns so many tornadoes:
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