SIO154: Immigration Attorney Ryan Witmer

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:30 Thomas: I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and what a news week, huh? Wow. Well, I'm not going to talk about that, but there's a lot of opening arguments content about the Trump news, the Michael Cohen news, The Manafort News. It's big. So definitely check that out if that's what you're interested in. But I have something that's a great interview and related to the Trump administration, which is Zerin from about a month back or so set me up with an immigration attorney that she had spoken to, and I interviewed, he was kind enough to come on and I asked him a bunch of questions about immigration law, policy, his work, and it's really interesting stuff.

0:01:16 Thomas: It was a great chance to work with someone who has dealt with these laws and these policies on the ground level there and knows more about it than I'm guessing you or I. So here's my interview with Ryan Witmer about immigration and asylum and Trump's policy versus Obama's policy, a lot of stuff. So here we go.

0:01:44 Thomas: I'm joined by Ryan Witmer. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. How's it going, Ryan? I am so excited to speak to you. It's, you know, I'm sure it's a busy time for you and anyone in your field, but first and foremost, do you want to kind of introduce yourself to the listeners? Tell us a little bit about you and the work you do.

0:01:49 Ryan: Oh, it's going well, Thomas, yeah, sure, absolutely, I am an immigration attorney, I work at a small law firm in Buffalo, New York, I've been doing this for about five years now, and we practice pretty much all areas of immigration law, we handle a lot of asylum cases, and other kinds of deportation defense, as well as family and business immigration.

0:02:34 Thomas: Yeah, it must be an interesting time to be doing your work, I imagine.

0:02:38 Ryan: It is the, you know, changes in the new administration are keeping us busy updating everything that we're doing on a monthly basis, it seems.

0:02:49 Thomas: Yeah definitely. Well, so much I want to to talk to you about. I suppose maybe I'll start, you know, because I spoke with Zerin on the show. She talked to us a bit about her situation. And, you know, I'm wondering maybe how typical her experience is, if you could speak generally about maybe asylum and, you know, U.S. policy and the kind of cases you see in general.

0:03:12 Ryan: Okay, yeah, well, I mean, there are so many different cases out there. You know, it really is unique for every person. You know, when we're talking about asylum cases, we're talking about people who are seeking the ability to live in the United States because they They have a fear of returning to their country of citizenship. So that can take a lot of different forms. You know, I have represented people as diverse as people running for opposition parties in Ethiopia, for instance. And then we have people who are the victims of domestic abuse coming from places like Guatemala.

0:03:57 Ryan: And so it really runs a pretty large gamut as far as, you know, what you see in those cases.

0:04:02 Thomas: Right. And this might be more of an opinion thing, but I was kind of shocked about, you know, it just doesn't seem like we do all that much in terms of as a country giving people asylum. Do you have any sense of, you know, how, how many people, or, or what, how our policy and numbers kind of compare to other countries, or is that outside of your, your expertise? Yeah.

0:04:27 Ryan: Yeah, I'm not aware of the number. I have the general sense that we have not been accepting a lot of refugees. In the United States, we classify people as, or using the refugee process when the process is occurring overseas and they're being approved and coming to the United States as a refugee, as opposed to asylum seekers, which are people who are already present in the country or are arriving at the border. So, you know, they can't do anything to stop people from making an asylum claim if they're already here, so they do have to process those cases, but I think they have been making it more and more difficult to obtain approvals for a lot of people. If

0:05:15 Thomas: That's, that's one thing, uh, uh, what I've seen among, you know, kind of liberal circles about the, the whole asylum thing with Trump is, a, well, first off, is it true that they, they tried, they kind of tried to eliminate certain categories of people that will accept, like, didn't they get rid of domestic abuse as a reason to seek asylum? Did that happen?

0:05:38 Ryan: Something like that happened, the recently, the Attorney, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has ultimate control over the administrative process for immigration, issued a decision. It's called Matter of A-B.

0:06:00 Ryan: And he, I don't think that it totally forecloses the idea of asylum for domestic abuse victims, But it outlays standards which may make it exceedingly difficult for these people to be granted. Where this comes from, you know, asylum doesn't protect anyone that would have a problem in their country. Instead, what it does is it says you have to have a nexus. And it protects people who would be persecuted in their country due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. So we're looking at that category of particular social groups and trying to decide, do domestic violence victims fit into that?

0:06:06 Thomas: Yeah,

0:06:53 Ryan: And Jeff Sessions more or less says no, but we're trying to carve out that distinction as much as we can.

0:07:01 Thomas: It's just so hard. I mean, and it sounds like these are cases you've potentially dealt with before. I mean can you talk about the human cost of that? It just seems to me that, you know, wouldn't, I can't imagine the spirit of America not not being, if your life is in danger and furthermore, you're a victim of domestic abuse. Like you're not, it's not as though these are, this, that would be a high terrorism alert, you know, like demographic. I just can't imagine not wanting to help people like that.

0:07:31 Ryan: Yeah, me either. I wish that we did. The challenge for us as practitioners is oftentimes to try to fit, you know, a square peg in a round hole, you trying to make these cases fit into the legal standards, you know, and this opinion matter of AB makes that harder to do.

0:07:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, so people potentially who might have been able to, to get in aren't going to be able to. Too. And then what about, there's so much, let's see, I think the next thing maybe to ask about is atheism, because hadn't ever, it hadn't occurred to me, but when we spoke to, when I spoke to Zerin on this show, when she's talking about the fact that, you know, her life could very well be and is most likely in danger as an atheist in her home country, but just in dealing dealing with the people who she has dealt with in this process, who don't get it, you know, who are kind of like, well, I don't understand, just don't be that or don't, you know, and I never thought like, oh, yeah, there might be people who just have no sympathy for that because they're religious or they're Muslim or they are whatever.

0:08:44 Thomas: Can you talk about people you've dealt with possibly who have to seek asylum as atheists? How has that gone? On? How's your experience been?

0:08:53 Ryan: I haven't dealt with too many cases where we had an atheist claim that have gone that have concluded so far. I have a couple active cases, actually. And that was one thing I wanted to do because I myself am an atheist. And I've had on more than one occasion someone come to me and say that, you know, they had difficulty in obtaining legal services or, you know, felt like their claim wasn't being taken seriously. So, you know, that's a real area of interest of mine and, you know, if anyone feels like they have that experience and they think that they they have an asylum claim based on atheism, I would love to talk to you and see if it's something we can help you with. I think, you know, it depends what country you're coming from. In places like Bangladesh and much of the Middle East, a lot of countries have laws on the books against apostasy. So it's pretty straightforward. You know, if

0:09:03 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, no,

0:10:01 Ryan: You have converted and left the faith, you could be subject even to criminal penalties under the laws of many countries. So, um, a lot of times, uh, atheist claims may be very strong claims that would have a very high likelihood of prevailing. But, and I apologize, I haven't listened to your interview with Zerin, but I imagine that, you know, she probably related to you a lot of the difficulties that even someone who has an exceptionally strong claim, this is still not an easy process to work your way through. So

0:10:24 Thomas: That's okay.

0:10:35 Thomas: Yeah yeah. And I was also surprised about the length of time it seems to take. Could you describe the process? You know how it allegedly is supposed to work? Is it really taking, you know, it seemed seemed like Darren thought it would take maybe a matter of years or there was some some confusion there. How long, what is the process supposed to be like if you're claiming asylum?

0:10:58 Ryan: There are two main ways that people process asylum claims. Affirmative claims are made by people who initiate the process themselves before having any kind of interaction with U.S. immigration. So, for instance, someone who travels to the United States on a visitor visa, and then while they're here, they decide to file the asylum claim. So nobody arrested them or tried to deport them or anything like that. They're doing this on their own. They call that an affirmative claim. Those get processed by USCIS, and this was never designed to be a three-year process. But due to, you know, an influx of cases and the lack of asylum officers, that's what it became.

0:11:49 Ryan: The backlog just became that long. So as of last year, someone who was filing an affirmative asylum claim, I would advise them to expect approximately a three-year wait before they have an interview. Interview. Now, what's, you know, there's been a recent change to this. The Trump administration a few months ago, I guess in an effort to address the backlog, has started reverse processing the cases. So actually, if you filed an affirmative case today, you would probably have an interview in the Buffalo area in about six months.

0:12:30 Thomas: You know, I think Zerin was getting at that, and I couldn't honestly quite understand what she was saying because I didn't, it didn't make much sense to me. But yeah, so that must have been what she meant, because I think she said at a certain point that people who were applying after her were going to get seen first. So that, that must've been what he was talking about.

0:12:47 Ryan: Right. So that was a recent policy change. And the rationale behind

0:12:50 Thomas: What, what does that even do? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. You're, you're about to say that.

0:12:51 Ryan: Yeah. No. What, what, what it's designed to do is, you know, so the longer the backlog becomes, the greater the incentive for someone to file a frivolous asylum plan.

0:13:06 Ryan: Right, so if you're not really afraid of your country, but you'd like to stay in the United States for three to eight years, and you'd to be able to obtain work authorization, you have to wait six months after filing your claim to be eligible for work authorization, but you could eventually get that. You know, that may be an attractive option to some people who are, you know, willing to inflate the truth a little bit, or, you know, to people that don't really think they can win their claim, but they do have some kind of fear or issue going on. So I think that, you know, I wasn't consulted on it, but I think the rationale behind that policy is to discourage people with weak claims filing them and thereby, you know, whittle down the backlog. But of course, the problem is for people who have been waiting for years for their case to get decided and actually have very strong claims. I don't know how long it's going to take those cases at this point. It may not take three years. It might take four or five years.

0:13:52 Thomas: Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I see what you're saying there. It would be a bit of a disincentive to just go file a false claim for the sake of trying to stay in the country for a while. So I suppose that makes sense. But yeah, it does does certainly have a cost. And then one thing I've been seeing in in, I guess, kind of liberal circles about this is that when you know, the the Trump administration is separating kids and locking people up and all that. There's this idea that like, oh, well, they broke the law. But also the I think the liberal response has been this may, I guess, depend on what the actual facts on the ground are. And it's kind of hard to tell sometimes. But the idea is, well. If you're just seeking asylum, you're not breaking any laws.

0:15:02 Thomas: Is that anything you know about? I mean, is there are there documented cases of people of the administration trying to either turn people away or prevent people from claiming asylum. Is that anything you could tell us about?

0:15:15 Ryan: Yeah, there are a lot of reports about people being discouraged from actually crossing the border and making the claim. So officers, instead of processing these people, basically trying to convince them to turn back, possibly even threatening them or intimidating them. Them. I think there are also cases of them limiting the amount of people that can come through a port of entry on a certain day. So you have people on, you know, the border towns in Mexico that are in like tents and shelters and stuff like that waiting to get across the bridge basically. So yeah, that's a problem. People, you you know, some asylum seekers are literally coming to the port of entry, you know, the same way as if you were coming to the United States on a visa through the land border.

0:16:11 Ryan: And when they get there, they tell the officer, no, I don't have a visa, but I can't go back to my country. I want to make an asylum claim. And you can process it that way. If you do that, you can expect to be taken into immigration detention, and it may take a month or two to go through an initial review process they call a credible fear screening. Screening.

That could happen in Texas or Arizona near where you cross the border if you came through the southern border. Or believe it or not, you could get shipped all the way up to my neck of the woods in Buffalo and be sitting in a nice detention center here waiting for your credible fear screening. So that's not necessarily an attractive option to a lot of people a a lot of people instead choose to cross illegally without inspection and oftentimes they don't even really have an intention of making it to the other side without getting caught. They just basically simply cross the border and surrender themselves to the officers on the other side. They'll also get taken into detention but they'll be eligible for a a bond. And sometimes they can have a benefit from doing it that way.

0:17:29 Thomas: Is this related to the catch and release thing you hear about?

0:17:33 Ryan: My mind, the catch and release terminology has shifted a bit over time. Back in the Obama administration, they used to talk about catch and release, meaning people who are apprehended crossing the border illegally would be sometimes instead of being processed and potentially deported they would simply take them back to their country like a voluntary deportation. And but they don't actually have a removal order or anything like that through a court process. Now I think what what the Trump administration is calling catch and release is the idea you know people being caught taken into the detention centers and then released on a bond or some kind of humanitarian parole.

0:18:22 Ryan: I think that's really a political issue. Think it's honestly ridiculous to keep the vast majority of immigrants who are in detention in detention facilities.

0:18:33 Thomas: Interesting.

0:18:34 Ryan: Most of these people either have committed no crime. It may be that the only thing that they did was they came to the border not having a visa in hand and told the CBP officer that they'd like to seek asylum because they're afraid to go back to their country. You know why do we need to arrest that person, take them into detention, you know it's just absolutely crazy to me and, um, in that situation is considered to be an arriving alien under the immigration laws, and what that that means is they're not eligible to be issued a bond from the immigration judge. So if I try to file a bond motion and ask, you know, for that person to be able to post $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 to secure their release, they're non-eligible for it. So it's totally within the discretion of ICE whether they're held in custody for their entire case or not. Yeah,

0:18:53 Thomas: Yeah, I agree.

0:19:31 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. You know, along those lines, I'm wondering if I could get kind of your expert opinion from your standpoint of where do you think the biggest shortcomings of our current policy, immigration policy are related to the areas you work in.

0:19:48 Ryan: Well, I think there are a lot of perverse incentives that we push. So, you of these was you know a system that encouraged people that don't really have asylum claims to file them anyways, so that they could spend in the United States processing that claim, which may have a benefit to them economically. I mean, I think there should be a broader conversation over how restrictive we are when it comes to bringing workers into the country and whether that's really actually harmful to us. But, you know, that didn't help the three-year backlog of asylum cases. As, exactly.

0:20:34 Thomas: Right. So so it's Like if we had more, if we allowed more people to just come to the country, country then we wouldn't have so many, so much incentive to like come here, uh, make perhaps a flimsy asylum claim to just, you know, wait, get, get a few bonus years in of of living here. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

0:20:57 Ryan: I mean, you Know, when we're talking about economic immigrants, you know they're coming here because there are jobs available for them that aren't being fulfilled by the people already here. So, you know, it doesn't really make a lot of sense to me why we want to make it nearly impossible for those people to come. But, you Know, if that's what the situation is, they probably shouldn't be doing that through the asylum process, right? And, you Now, if we allow a system to become so backlogged, that it takes, you know, three years for a case to go to a first interview, then that's going to cause problems. So, you know, that needs to be fixed. The Trump administration's tried to do that by reverse processing the cases to take away the incentives. I think a better idea would be to hire more asylum officers.

0:21:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:50 Thomas: I was gonna, I was going to ask that simple question. What, you know, what, how, how hard could that be in the grand scheme of government money? You know, how, how difficult or how burdensome could it really be to hire some more people to do this work?

0:22:03 Ryan: Right. We're drastically increasing the size of the enforcement arm, their staffing. So they're apprehending more and more people and putting them into processes that are already backlogged. You know, I think we're not really addressing where the log jams are. Are. So unfortunately, for people like Zerin and other legitimate asylum seekers, of which there are many, these people are going to be held in limbo for years and years while they wait for a decision. And people like me will tell them they have a very strong chance of getting permanent residency at some point, but they're still sitting and waiting and feeling every day like, When am I going to get a decision?

0:22:49 Ryan: Will they deny my case? Will a policy change? Things like that can happen. But I think another truly perverse incentive is the idea of arriving aliens not being eligible for immigration bonds, because that encourages people to enter without inspection. Because if they enter without inspection, they may be able to secure a bond. So at least if they have some money or their family does, then they don't have to process their case from a detention center. And, you know, why we have a policy that encourages people to enter without inspection, rather than coming to the border and speaking to the immigration officers and requesting asylum or whatever else they're trying to do, you know, that, that baffles me.

0:23:41 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah, I didn't necessarily know about that. So we have a policy that if you're apprehended from within the country, then you're able to be released on bond, but if you apprehend, or like, if you accept it at the border or whatever it is, if you grabbed at the boarder, then you, you can't, you're just stuck in the facility. Is that what you're saying? Oh.

0:24:02 Ryan: Yeah, that's, that's it. And the idea is you're an arriving alien and you're not admitted to the country by the customs officer, you're considered to have been admitted. Basically, if you ask for something like that,

0:24:19 Thomas: So you don't have the same like constitutional rights, whereas if they grab somebody within the county, they have a different set of rights because for all the government knows they could just be a citizen. Is it that kind of the general difference? Okay.

0:24:34 Ryan: It comes from the Immigration and Nationality Act. They may have had constitutional concerns about how they detain people present in the United States when that was drafted. Um, but that, you know, that's the law where this comes from and it just provides this distinction between aliens apprehended in the United States who the government thinks are deportable versus someone who's requesting to be admitted to the country. The person requesting to be admitted is considered an arriving alien and, you know, if they're not admitted, they could just be turned back to where they came from. But if you have someone at the U.S.-Mexico border who's from El Salvador, say, and they tell the officer that they want to seek asylum and they have the right to have that case processed here, then what they do is they don't legally admit them into the country, but they physically enter the country and they start

0:24:50 Thomas: So

0:25:37 Ryan: To go through the asylum procedure. So in this situation, legally, they're treated as if they're still standing at the border requesting entry. And under the Immigration and Nationality Act, that limits their rights and makes them ineligible for an immigration bond.

0:25:58 Thomas: Is this, uh, part of the reason why these facilities are so overcrowded, and that's why we're seeing, you know, some, some real makeshift facilities where people are being kept? Yeah.

0:26:09 Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. And were a lot of people being detained under the Obama administration, and and this was an issue back then as well, but Now we're seeing even increase resistance to releasing these people from detention. Yeah, it's created terrible situations and there are backlogs in many of the courts as well that are processing these detained cases. It's not that uncommon for me to have clients who are spending between four to eight months in a detention facility waiting for a trial. The government is making efforts to try to speed that up. They've done that by placing this quota system on immigration judges and putting a lot of pressure on them to move cases very quickly. But there still are backlogs even for detained people.

0:26:20 Thomas: Yeah. So I know a lot of the questions that are going to be on everybody's mind, we were talking a little bit before, it might not be directly stuff you're working with, but I'm sure you would be able to give us some information that would be better than the information we have about the separating kids from their parents. Mic. I've you seeing claims that this is not that different from something Obama was doing. I've also seen the counterargument being that Obama was dealing with people who were sending unaccompanied minors to the border and the Obama administration had to do something with them. And so it would detain them in these facilities. But that seems to me to be much different than purposefully separating kids from their own parents.

0:27:57 Thomas: Uh, I, you know, there are lots of claims being made either way. What, what is your view of what is happening in that situation?

0:28:03 Ryan: Yeah, so I don't have direct experience with family separation cases. But my understanding of what's going on is they do have family detention centers for immigration separation. It's kind of a scary idea, but they do have facilities where they can detain a family where you have a mother and father and young children all housed in the same secured facility. Those facilities are operated by ICE. The issue with family separation occurs occurs when, say, you decide to prosecute the parents for improper entry, which I believe is a class B misdemeanor.

0:28:57 Ryan: Entering the country in a manner not authorized is a crime. That's no surprise to anyone. It's not a felony or what I would consider a particularly serious crime, but it is a crime. I think the vast majority of people that do that do not get prosecuted. I meet people every day who have entered improperly and have not been prosecuted. But some people are, typically if they plead guilty they'll get a sentence of time served that will be maybe 15 to 30 days or so. Basically, basically, once they, the plea agreement done and go see the judge, that's the end of their sentence.

0:29:43 Ryan: The problem is when that person is taken into criminal custody, they get taken by the US Marshals and they're held in federal criminal custody, not in ICE custody. So that's where the separation issue occurs, is now, you know, so if you have a father and his minor daughter who arrive at the border together, they enter illegally. If you arrest the father and charge him with improper entry and take him to a federal facility, then the the minor daughter daughter is not being charged with a crime, uh, she's not going to a federal uh jail, she's going to be taken into immigration custody and then they have to figure out what to do with her and um, you know, they have a process of trying to find a sponsor in the United States, perhaps another family member or someone that can take her, um, her father right now can't because he's in federal custody. And apparently they've had no end of problems in reuniting these people later on, even when they're ordered to do so by a federal judge.

So the way I see it, to the extent that there is a, know, the law creates a problem, you know, this is entirely within the purview of the federal government. You know, it's their decision whether they want to prosecute the father for a class B misdemeanor or whether they'd rather not do that and let the family stay together in immigration custody in one of these family detention centers or whether they think that, you know,

0:31:30 Ryan: These people are unlikely to commit crimes in the United States and maybe they can be released on their own recognizance or by posting a small bail or agreeing to some other terms of supervision or something like that. You know so

0:31:46 Thomas: So that would be your, Like, if you, if you pulled the strings, if you were the one in control, is that what you would do, is, is just use the discretion to not prosecute people for, uh, kind of what's what's kind of a minor thing, but no matter how minor it is, it enables, or I guess it results in, one way or the other, parents being separated from kids. Um, is that what you would do, is just use discretion to not uh prosecute people like that, or what, what do you think the solution is, yeah

0:31:47 Ryan: Right.

0:32:19 Ryan: I I Think as a prosecutor you have to look at, you know, the aims of of justice. You know, what am I accomplishing through a prosecution. And you know, um, I think the interest of keeping a family together and not creating a situation where maybe a child ends up, um, know, with, uh, being placed with like a foster family in the United States and never sees her father again because he ends up getting deported separately from her. I mean, what are we talking about, like, like Um, we're weighing that potential against, you know, making somebody sit in jail for 20 days or so to learn his lesson. And that he can't cross the border in this way.

0:32:51 Thomas: Which He probably did to try to save his family anyway. I mean, it doesn't, it's it, it seems, seems incredibly cruel and pointless to me, but I just want to make sure there isn't something I'm missing.

0:33:15 Ryan: No, no, there's not. And it goes back to the issue of detention for arriving aliens as well. You, did he cross the boarder in that way versus, you know, going across the bridge and speaking to the officers? You know, was that influence because somebody told him if he does that then he's going to be stuck in the detention center for months and months. You know, I don't know. I'm sure it varies case to case. But yeah, it's these draconian enforcement policies that create their own problems. Right.

0:33:48 Thomas: So it really does seem to be a problem of their own making. You know, it's not as though it's as though their hands are tied on this issue. It seems like.

0:33:57 Ryan: Absolutely not. And I can't, you know, know with certainty that it never happened. But I think during the Obama administration, they would just simply not prosecute people in these situations, which would help keep the family together. Haven't investigated that. There might be examples of them doing it too, but I don't think they had the volume of this that has occurred under the Trump administration. Well,

0:34:12 Thomas: Right.

0:34:25 Thomas: Yeah. Are there any other aspects of the policy that you can talk about the changes of? You know, I mean, how what other areas have the Trump administration pushed or changed policies from the way the Obama administration was doing it?

0:34:42 Ryan: In general, anything involving discretion on the part of the enforcement authorities has become very difficult under the Trump administration. Before the change, we were oftentimes able to work with ICE and sometimes reach negotiated results in difficult cases. Cases, maybe someone that has a serious conviction, but also has tremendous family equities in the United States. And really, they don't have relief in court that we can go and prove an asylum case or something like that. But nevertheless, there's a humanitarian interest in them not being deported. Those cases are getting almost impossible to get approved.

0:35:29 Thomas: Wow.

0:35:30 Ryan: And as one example, who have entered the country without inspection, who've entered illegally, they're not eligible for adjustment of status, which is the process of being admitted as a permanent resident from within the United States. So basically, if you came 10 years ago on a visitor visa that was valid for six months after you entered, but then you just never left, so you overstayed the visa, you violated its conditions, you're here the time that you were authorized. And if you got apprehended, you could be deported. But you just never got caught. You've been here 10 years. If you marry a U.S. citizen, can most likely file some paperwork and have a green card in six months.

0:36:19 Ryan: But if you enter, not on a visa, but without inspection, even, you know, say it was nine years ago, you're not going to be eligible to do that, even if you marry a U.S. citizen. There is a process you could apply for what they call a waiver of unlawful presence, and you could leave the United States and have the visa process in the consulate in your country and come back. Can't do this if you have an active case in an immigration court. We used to routinely to close cases when someone was eligible to do this. And now we have a significant number of cases where the government is refusing to agree to this.

0:37:10 Ryan: There was another decision by Jeff Sessions which that the immigration courts are are not permitted to close the case for this reason. They have to continue to set hearings for the case and decide it. And this is extremely harmful to a large number of people. And again, it's not clear to me what the government's interest is in this. We're talking about family separation in most of these cases.

0:37:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, the interest is keeping certain people out of the country, I think. But that's just me. Yeah I'm curious. I mean kind of winding down now because I don't want to stress your time too much. I'm sure you're very busy these days, but I would be curious if you'd be so kind as to kind of offer your opinion, you know, as a, as a voter, as a citizen, what personally, what, what changes would you like to see happen? What would you see, what would you like to see candidates running on in 2020, or even, I guess, in the midterms here, you know, what are the, what are the kinds of issues that, or changes or legislation proposals that you'd like to see?

0:38:19 Ryan: Well, I think that we do need to address immigration through legislation. The system, which was, you know, last overhauled in 1997 is, you know, I'm not sure it was a good system then, but needs to be updated to account for where we are now. We need to get a path forward for the dreamers, people who come to the United States unlawfully as children, generally through no fault of their own, they are in complete limbo right now. That needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, I think these things need to be done through Congress. We need to get people in Congress who are interested in actually hashing out a solution and not just having political fights that deadlock. If you know how to make that happen, let me know, Thomas.

0:38:54 Thomas: Oh, yeah.

0:39:15 Thomas: Yeah, well, it's the same message that I have every week on both my shows, which is vote in the midterms. Vote, everybody. Get out there and do it. Mostly because I know everybody listening is probably mostly on my side of the aisle. If you're a Trump supporter, don't vote. No, I'm just kidding. That's the only way I know. I don't know. You got any ideas?

0:39:37 Ryan: No, unfortunately, I don't. I'm just to hold it together until they do.

0:39:39 Thomas: Okay, yeah. Yeah. It's so hard to. Yeah, I know. Like because DACA, these issues explode and we pay we rightfully pay attention to them for a while. And then the next thing happens and it's, you know, you bring up DACA and I 100 percent agree. I had a DACA. I want to use the right term terminology because people say DACA recipient, you Know, and it is really they are just paying money to be able to pay taxes. Like it's not even, they're not even receiving anything other than, I guess, not being kicked out of the country. But I had a DACA, I suppose, member or whatever you'd say on the show. And yeah, it's like I was really fired up at the time about that. I mean, I still would like to say I'm fired up about it, but the truth is issue B, C, Z, you know, B through Z through back around numeral one, you Know, whatever, however you want to do a number system, it pops up again and it's so hard to keep our focus.

0:40:36 Thomas: But it's a good reminder that DACA, you know, DACA people are in, purgatory right now and probably don't have any idea what their future holds. And that's that's horrifying. So it's good reminder reminder that I very much think that's a campaign issue, too. And just in my opinion, politically, to say, hey, here's somebody who was brought to this country at, you you know, age two or something, doesn't even know another country, just wants to pay taxes. Like that's really, I mean, DACA makes money, essentially. How could that be a losing issue? It's just shocking to me that we can't resolve that.

0:41:13 Ryan: Yeah, I totally agree.

0:41:15 Thomas: All right. Well, you've been very generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on, Ryan Witmer. And if there's anybody who might need to obtain your services or anything, I mean, do you want to put out a website or a contact or anything like that?

0:41:28 Ryan: Yeah, sure. I am with the law office of Matthew Borowski in Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. You can find us at www.borowskilaw.com. That's B-O-R-O-W-S-K-I-L-A-W.com

0:41:44 Thomas: That's excellent. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. It's good luck with these cases that it seems like are getting longer and longer and more difficult to know what's going to happen. But keep up the good work.

0:41:59 Ryan: And thank you, Thomas. I think one of the most important things people can do is bring attention to these issues. That is one good thing we have going on is the public is starting to learn about it and hopefully we can make some changes. So thanks for your time.

0:42:14 Thomas: Thank you.

0:42:41 Thomas: Another huge thanks to Ryan Witmer, appreciate his time so much, really interesting stuff, and again, it all comes down to us needing to vote to fix these issues. I mean, it's not going to be any mystery that we need to vote for Democrats to get any of this fixed, but it was interesting to hear a lot of those details. Hey, looks like for once I might end up with the right timing on that last episode of the month thing, so if you guys want to leave voicemails, I already have gotten some, been a lot of interesting topics this month. So check out that voicemail hop on there. The number is in the show notes. Give me a call, leave a shortish message if you can, shorten to the point. If you mess up, you can try again. Oh, and by the way, if you do a minor screw up, I edit those. So it's not as though, I think one time I had somebody call back like four times because they kept screwing up a minor thing.

0:43:31 Thomas: You don't have to do that because I can I can edit them. But but yeah, Call in. It was a really interesting month and next week we should be on schedule, assuming the sky doesn't fall, which it might. We should be on schedule for a voicemail episode, my favorite ones to do. So please chime in there. I look forward to it and as always support the show at SeriousPod.com slash support or Patreon.com slash Serious Pod. You make the show happen when you do that and I can't thank you enough. So thank you so much and see you next week.