There is a straw in the wind or two that suggest that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is helping staff the Russian Army, on occasion, by deporting draft dodgers back to Russia, where they are sure to be scooped up for front-line assignments.
The evidence, beyond an article in the UK’s The Guardian, is slender. That article, dated March 18 and headlined “Biden administration quietly resumes deportations to Russia”, is now behind a paywall, though I have a hard copy of it. It stated:
Immigration advocates were taken by surprise when a young Russian man, who came to the US in the last year fleeing Vladimir Putin’s efforts to mobilize citizens to fight Ukraine, was abruptly deported at the weekend from the US back to Russia.
Jennifer Scarborough, a Texas-based attorney whose clients include four Russian men who entered the US across the border from Mexico is among those contending with policy confusion.
The other bit of evidence we have is an email from former U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R-N.H.) to my colleague Todd Bensman asking the Center about this policy, in which he reported:
A Russian citizen, age 27, fled Russia to Turkey last fall when “partial mobilization” was announced, ultimately entered the U.S. illegally and was apprehended. Removal proceedings [are] under way.
If the U.S. sends the young man back to Russia, he will be inducted into the army and likely will be sent to the front as punishment for having attempted to evade conscription. Deportation from the U.S. could well be a death sentence.
The young man’s pro-bono attorney is preparing an asylum application, but the judge who will preside has rejected 97 percent of asylum applications, according to Syracuse University TRAC ... . It seems unconscionable, unprincipled and cruel to send back to Russia young men who fled conscription into an army conducting an inhuman and criminal war against civilians.
Our first question: Are the senator and the Guardian writing about the same case, or are these two quite separate stories? We have asked the senator for more specific details, but he has yet to respond. Google says that he lives in New Hampshire.
We followed up on two clues mentioned above. The local bar association lists Jennifer Scarborough as an immigration lawyer in Harlingen; that’s close to the border in the Rio Grande Valley, but she does not have a listed phone number, so no help there.
The next clue was the senator’s reference to the otherwise obscure TRAC listing of the asylum denial rate of 97 percent — there cannot be very many judges with this rating, we thought, and if we could look at the list we could get the judge’s location.
It turns out that there are hundreds of immigration judges and seven of them have 97 percent asylum rejection rates, and 11 have 96 percent rates. One of them, with a 96.4 percent denial rating, sits in the Los Fresnos court, which is a few miles from Harlingen. He is Immigration Judge Paul Hable, apparently a sitting judge, not a retired one.
So are the left-leaning Guardian and the very conservative ex-senator talking about the same case? It seems somewhere between possible and probable.
If this deportation is a once-only situation, that’s one thing; if it is part of a hidden pattern, perhaps the immigration bar and the Ukrainian embassy should be raising hell about it. Why let in millions of folks from south of the border and then take special pains to deport one or more individuals to serve in Putin’s army?