NEW YORK - US Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday barred immigration judges from a once-common practice of shelving deportation cases involving some immigrants with deep ties to the United States.
The practice known as administrative closure allowed judges to clear low-priority cases off their dockets, effectively letting some immigrants remain indefinitely in the United States despite their lack of legal status.
Under President Barack Obama there had been an effort to administratively close certain cases as a way of allowing judges to focus on higher-priority matters and reduce the immigration court backlog. More than 200,000 cases were closed during the last six years of his presidency.
The closures were routinely used for people without criminal backgrounds who had lived for many years in the United States, often with U.S. citizen children or spouses. In many cases, the immigrants became eligible for work permits.
The administration of President Donald Trump has taken a sharply different tack on immigration, declaring that all those in the country illegally, whether or not they pose a threat to public safety, are subject to deportation.
Since immigration courts fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice, the attorney general can issue opinions in immigration cases to establish legal precedent for judges across the country and the Board of Immigration Appeals.
On Thursday, Sessions issued such an order in a case in which a judge had granted administrative closure for an unaccompanied minor from Guatemala.
Before Sessions' ruling, the government or an immigrant could ask a judge to close a case. The attorney general ruled that judges "do not have the general authority to suspend indefinitely immigration proceedings by administrative closure." He said exceptions could be made in some cases, including when an immigrant has certain forms of legal status pending.
Sessions had already quietly been instituting the policy even before this announcement. Reuters reported last June that government prosecutors were moving to put cases that had been previously closed back on the court calendar.
Sessions acknowledged in the order, however, that recalendaring all cases that had been closed "would likely overwhelm the immigration courts." Immigration attorneys and advocates quickly criticized Sessions' decision. The ruling was intended "to reduce immigration judges to deportation machines," said Chuck Roth of the National Immigrant Justice Center.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - Drug manufacturer Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals was fined $35 million Tuesday for supplying and not reporting suspicious massive orders of its highly addictive oxycodone, helping to fuel the US addiction crisis.
The Justice Department said the company agreed to pay the amount to settle allegations that it did not meet obligations to report to the Drug Enforcement Administration suspect orders from pharmacies in Florida and elsewhere.
Mallinckrodt, which manufactures drugs in the United States but keeps its corporate headquarters in London, has been under investigation since 2011 by the DEA for shipping huge amounts of oxycodone via distributors to small communities that could not possibly generate demand.
The barely controlled pumping of hundreds of millions of doses of opioids into US communities by major drug manufacturers during the past decade is blamed for a sharp surge in addiction and overdose deaths which totaled an estimated 60,000 last year.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a speech Tuesday that the United States "has paid an increasingly high price for drug abuse. We have paid for it in broken relationships and broken lives and death rates the likes of which we have never seen before."
"Mallinckrodt's actions and omissions formed a link in the chain of supply that resulted in millions of oxycodone pills being sold on the street," he said in a separate statement on the settlement.
The $35 million settlement was equivalent to 7.2 percent of the company's 2016 net profits.
In a statement, the company said it disagreed with the government's allegations and denied it violated any laws.
"We are proud of the fact that Mallinckrodt has long been an industry leader in actively combating the serious issue of prescription drug abuse," said the company's general counsel Michael-Bryant Hicks.
pmh/mdl
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump on Tuesday abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey in the fallout over Comey's probe of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's emails last year, saying Comey was no longer able to effectively lead the agency.
"It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission," Trump said in a letter to Comey released by the White House.
Trump told Comey in the letter he accepted the recommendation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions that "you are not able to effectively lead the bureau."
Comey has been embroiled in controversy surrounding his probe into whether Clinton's use of a private email server while U.S. secretary of state during President Barack Obama's first term compromised national security.
He said in July that the case should be closed without prosecution, but then declared - 11 days before the Nov. 8 election - that he had reopened the investigation because of a discovery of a new trove of Clinton-related emails.
It was a decision Democrats believe cost Clinton victory.
The White House released a memo by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about Comey's actions.
"I cannot defend the Director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken," Rosenstein wrote.
Rosenstein identified several areas in which he said Comey had erred, saying it was wrong of him to "usurp" then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch's authority by announcing the initial conclusion of the email case on July 5.
Comey "announced his own conclusions about the nation's most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders," Rosenstein wrote. Comey also "ignored another longstanding principle" by holding a news conference to "release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation."
Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday it made him "mildly nauseous" to think his announcement of the reopening of an investigation into Clinton's emails affected the 2016 presidential election, but he had no regrets and would make the same decision again.
(Reporting by Steve Holland and Jeff Mason; Editing by Peter Cooney)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
CHICAGO - The online video footage of a United Airlines passenger dragged off a flight, which damaged the company's reputation, highlighted the limited options US passengers have on overbooked flights.
United's problems began after security officers on Sunday dragged a
69-year-old man off a flight from Chicago to Louisville, Kentucky,
because he refused to be "bumped" -- an airline practice that has gotten
increased scrutiny in light of the incident.
Some passengers recorded the incident and posted videos online. The resulting furor led to a public relations nightmare and battered United's stock Tuesday, sending it down 2.9 percent in afternoon trading.
The Department of Transportation said Tuesday it was reviewing United's actions "to determine whether the airline complied with the oversales rule."
"It is the airline's responsibility to determine its own fair boarding priorities," DOT said in a statement.
The incident shined a new light on the practice of overbooking, which airlines increasingly rely upon to avoid losing money on empty seats when some passengers do not show up for scheduled flights.
If they were to stop overbooking, "the only way of trying to compensate for that over the long term would be to raise fares on everyone else," said industry analyst Robert Mann.
Instead, airlines sell more tickets than there are seats on a plane, and are generally able to properly forecast demand to avoid major disruptions in getting passengers to their destinations, Mann said.
But, sometimes, they miscalculate and there are more passengers than a flight can handle. In those instances, airlines offer travel vouchers, and cash compensation that can go north of $1,000, to entice some passengers to voluntarily give up their seats and fly on later flights.
When enticing does not work, airlines have wide latitude, spelled out in the conditions of carriage contract passengers agree to when purchasing a ticket, Mann said.
'YOU DON'T REALLY HAVE ANY RIGHTS'
"If you're still in the terminal waiting to board, you can be told you can't board, even if you have a reservation, even if you have a ticket. And once you're on board, you are subject to being deplaned based on the order of the crew. So you don't really have any rights," Mann said.
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) allows for all this, with some conditions. Chief among them, that airlines try to coax passengers off flights first and offer financial compensation.
Last year, 434,000 passengers volunteered to be bumped off flights, while another 40,000 were bumped involuntarily and compensated.
In the United incident, the airline forced four randomly selected passengers off the plane to make room for four crew members who needed to get to Louisville, after no one would give up their seat voluntarily.
United said that it offered compensation of up to $1,000 on Sunday, but no passengers on the Chicago-Louisville flight volunteered, likely because the next flight would have been on the following day.
The passenger who was dragged off had reportedly protested and alleged that he was being targeted due to his ethnicity, according to witness accounts, which initially identified the man as Chinese American.
That caused angry condemnations on Chinese social media sites.
US media on Tuesday identified the man as a doctor of Vietnamese heritage living in Kentucky, who had at one point been convicted of trading drugs for sex and had had his medical license suspended until last year.
ALIENATING PASSENGERS
In a written statement on Monday, United chief executive Oscar Munoz said United was "reaching out to this passenger to talk directly to him and further address and resolve this situation."
But in a letter to employees, which was obtained by US media, he appeared to cast part of the blame on the passenger, saying he "defied" authorities and "compounded" the incident.
"Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this," Munoz wrote.
United's should have shown more concern for their passengers, said Andy Holdsworth, a crisis management specialist at the British PR firm Bell Pottinger.
"Whilst the passenger's behavior was not good, United have shown no compassion or concern for the man," he said.
The PR nightmare was the second in about two weeks for the airline.
In late March, two teenage girls were prevented from boarding a flight in Denver because they wore leggings.
The airline defended its action at the time by saying the girls were flying on passes that required them to abide by a dress code in return for free or discounted travel.
"They will need to be careful that these small incidents all start to add up and only remind us of the last incident as well as the current one," Holdsworth said.
nov/jm
source: news.abs-cbn.com
