The next day, she received an email from the Justice Department that shocked her: The administration asked her to delete the tweets. They claimed she violated a policy against making a record of immigration court proceedings and threatened potential criminal penalties if she committed "further violations."
The Justice Department retracted its request and apologized to Langarica after The Chronicle inquired about the threat, saying further review confirmed she was not tweeting from the courtroom and thus did not violate any policies.
Still, the surprising episode raised several issues, including First Amendment concerns, issues of transparency in the often secretive immigration courts as well as criticisms of the policy at the heart of the dispute.
"It (was) shocking, because we are in our right to observe these proceedings, we are in our right to share with the public what is happening in these court rooms," Langarica said in an interview before the apology had been issued. Langarica is an attorney with UCLA's Center for Immigration Law and Policy and formerly with the San Diego American Civil Liberties Union.
The agency "was right to apologize and retract its unlawful threat to ... Monika Langarica," the center's co-director Ahilan Arulanantham said in a statement. "Shedding light on the cruelty of Biden's (remain in Mexico) policy is essential, not illegal."
Under a quirk of federal law, the immigration courts are wholly controlled by the Justice Department, including the judges being employees overseen by the attorney general. The agency's courts branch is called the Executive Office for Immigration Review. The Justice Department does have policies governing the use of electronic devices in immigration courtrooms, but their initial threats in response to Langarica's tweets, which did not violate the policy in any apparent ways, alarmed Langarica and her colleagues.
In an email Tuesday morning that was shared with The Chronicle, the Justice Department informed Langarica that "upon further review of your posts, the timestamps reveal that you did not post to social media during the proceedings, and those posts therefore did not violate Federal regulation or EOIR policy. We regret the error and apologize for requesting that you remove those posts."
In a statement, an official with the agency said it "regrets requesting that the attorney delete her tweets and has apologized to the attorney."
Langarica was observing proceedings in what are known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, or MPP, a Trump-era policy that requires that migrants who arrive at the southern border seeking asylum or other protections in the U.S. wait in Mexico until their cases are decided. President Biden initially ended the program, but a federal judge ordered it to be reinstated. The Biden administration has recently resumed the policy, they say with more humane provisions, but immigration advocates have fumed that Biden and his officials did not try harder to avoid re-implementing the system that Biden himself decried.
In a critical series of tweets that are time-stamped to confirm Langarica sent them after leaving the San Diego court, the attorney described everything she observed that day, including what she argued was insufficient access to legal guidance for migrants. She also described and quoted from a particular court proceeding where the judge told a migrant she had to find an attorney herself if she wanted one, urging her to keep calling attorneys until one answered and could take her case, while the migrant said she did not have enough phone minutes to do so.
At the end of her string of tweets, Langarica critically concluded that the MPP policy "tramples on due process" and forces people to make impossible choices, like buying minutes to call attorneys who may not answer or saving money for housing across the border.
The next day, she received an email from the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review public information officer who covers courts in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, according to a copy of the email obtained by The Chronicle.
"Usage of cameras or recording devices in courtrooms or other EOIR space is prohibited," the officer wrote. "Usage of electronic devices to make a record — audio or written transcription — of the proceedings is prohibited. Accordingly, please delete the tweets linked here as your tweets are contemporaneous transcriptions of the proceedings in violation of the security directive."
The message continued: "Please note that further violation of the aforementioned security directive may result in you being removed from EOIR space. Additionally, further violations may result in criminal consequences."
The later apology and retraction from the Justice Department came from a different civil servant based in the main D.C. office.
It is unclear why the Justice Department targeted Langarica. Countless journalists, including from The Chronicle, have observed immigration court proceedings and reported on their content. The Washington Post published a story about MPP that included courtroom quotes the same week Langarica received the email ordering her tweets removed.
It is relatively common practice for immigration attorneys and advocates to observe court proceedings and share what happens inside, without facing takedown requests. A North Carolina immigration attorney was prosecuted and convicted for using her cell phone in an immigration courtroom after being ordered to stop. But the email from the Justice Department to Langarica made no mention of in-court disruption, only pointing to the tweets themselves as improper transcription.
"The big question here is why is DOJ using resources to threaten the few lawyers that are actually present in this space that lacks critical access to legal resources instead of fixing or addressing in any way the inherent due process issues in MPP court?" Langarica said.
"In the context I think of any immigration court proceedings that are open to the public, this is egregious. In the context of MPP court, in the context of a process that is so egregious in terms of due process violations and inhumanity that allow it to operate, it is incomprehensible."
(c)2022 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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