Declaration — East Bay Sanctuary v. Trump

Record facts

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California · No. 4:18-cv-06810-JST · Doc. 71-11 · 2018-12-04 · Docket on CourtListener

Full text

SUPPLEMENTAL DECLARATION OF STEPHEN W. MANNING, EXECUTIVE 
DIRECTOR, INNOVATION LAW LAB 
 
I, Stephen W. Manning, declare as follows: 
1. 
I am an attorney licensed to practice in the State of Oregon and am a member in 
good standing of the bars of the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the 
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court of the United 
States.  I am a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (“AILA”), a former 
member of the Board of Governors of AILA, and a former Chair of the Oregon Chapter of 
AILA. I am over 18 and have personal knowledge of the facts described herein. 
2. 
I am the Executive Director of the Innovation Law Lab (“the Law Lab”), a 
nonprofit in Oregon that I founded to improve the legal rights of immigrants and refugees in the 
United States.  
3. 
I write this declaration to supplement my prior declaration filed in East Bay 
Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump and to provide an update on the effect the DHS-DOJ regulation 
and Presidential Proclamation have had on our organization’s work.   
4. 
The Rule and Proclamation are frustrating Law Lab’s core mission, which is to 
improve the legal rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States by providing 
representation to asylum seekers in the United States.  We work towards this mission by creating 
and supporting systems of Massive Collaborative Representation at strategic sites throughout the 
country where the rule of law is under threat.  Massive Collaborative Representation uses data 
analytics to pinpoint how effective lawyers win cases, and then converts those findings into 
replicable processes that can be delegated across multiple lawyers and legal workers.     
5. 
In service of our mission, Law Lab runs four fully operational Centers of 
Excellence—in Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and Portland 
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Oregon—where lawyers work collaboratively to revitalize judicial ecosystems and win every 
meritorious asylum claim.  Our BorderX program seeks to apply the Massive Collaborative 
Representation model to detention-based advocacy, and creates and implements a collaborative 
system that allows advocates from across the country to work together on effective and strategic 
requests for the release of asylum seekers from detention on parole and bond.   
6. 
Because of the confusion that the regulation and Proclamation have wrought on 
the border, many asylum seekers are now unable to enter the United States, as they must do in 
order to seek asylum.  If the regulation is permitted to take effect, any asylum seeker who 
entered between ports of entry would be unable to access asylum.  Because our mission is to 
provide representation to asylum seekers in the United States, the regulation and Proclamation 
have frustrated our mission.   
7. 
As a result, and as we had anticipated, our organizational resources have been 
significantly diverted to remedy the frustration caused by the regulation’s implementation.  
Based on our organizational expertise in building and supporting legal representation projects, 
we have had to become a collaborative partner in the development of a new project being built to 
meet the legal needs of asylum seekers at the border who are affected by the new rule.  Our 
participation in this project, and our role as a consulting expert to other responding organizations, 
has been very time consuming, and has forced us to divert resources away from key 
organizational services.   
8. 
First, Law Lab’s technological resources have been diverted.  At the heart of 
Innovation Law Lab is LawLab, our proprietary data analytics and case management software. 
LawLab enables attorneys and nonprofit organizations to map out best practices to efficiently 
represent clients and obtain the best possible outcome in all cases.  To that end, we employ three 
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software engineers—two fulltime and one halftime—to maintain our software and also develop 
new technologies that improve both our organization’s work and the practice of immigration law.     
9. 
The issuance of the Proclamation and the regulation forced us to develop an 
entirely new technology, as we had to effectively move much of our work with asylum seekers 
across the border.  Our programs and supporting software are built around the coordination and 
provision of legal services to asylum seekers within the United States—either to clients in 
detention centers, or to clients who have been released on parole or bond.  Though the provision 
of legal services and information is time-sensitive in these contexts, before the Proclamation and 
regulation, we could safely provide information and representation once asylum seekers were 
across the border because their manner of entry did not substantively affect asylum eligibility.  
After the issuance of the Proclamation and regulation, our usual point of contact and service 
provision became too late, as individuals who had crossed the border between ports of entry 
would no longer be eligible for asylum.  
10. 
This frustrated our mission and created new urgency in the timeline of our 
provision of services and information, as we knew we had to divert our resources away from 
other program areas to reach our potential clients before they crossed the border in order to 
preserve their eligibility for asylum.  Our existing software is best suited for use on a computer, 
which does not pose a problem in office settings and other sites that are remotely connected to 
the detention centers where we work.  Computers and office space are much less available at the 
border, however, as much of the client intake and information sharing occurs in crowded group 
spaces like shelters, parks, and at migrant gatherings near the border.  Thus, we concluded that 
we needed to develop a new technological tool that would allow legal workers to use mobile 
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phones to collect confidential case information and upload it to a secure database. The resulting 
technology has been deployed and is being utilized by our partners and volunteers at the border.   
11. 
Development and implementation of this technology has taken one of our fulltime 
software engineers, Chris Kuttruff, away from other project needs, however, as he has had to 
turn to the project almost full-time.  Usually, Chris is tasked with providing infrastructure 
support for our servers, which support the case databases of our software clients.  His role 
includes managing server security, implementing automation and monitoring for system 
reliability, and performing various tests and auditing.  The urgent need for development of the 
cross-border technological tool has taken Chris away from planned improvements to our case 
management software and from his monitoring role.   This negatively affects the work of our 
existing projects, as our programs rely heavily on maintenance and improvement of our case 
management technology to function effectively.  Eventually, it may also affect our revenue 
streams, as subscriptions to the LawLab software provide a meaningful percentage of our 
organizational funding.  We have been unable to roll out planned improvements to the software, 
which limits our ability to effectively market our product and obtain new subscriptions to the 
LawLab software. If the disruption continues, this diversion could eventually affect the product 
satisfaction of our existing customer base and cause us to lose subscribers.     
12. 
Second, Law Lab’s legal and program staff have been forced to turn significant 
time and attention to our response to the regulation.  Given the complex legal landscape facing 
asylum seekers at the border, we have had to devote significant energy to developing the most 
accurate guidance and effective legal services model we can provide under the circumstances.  
This has required revisiting and redrafting the existing resources, templates, and guides that we 
and other partner organizations have developed over years of binational collaboration to support 
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asylum seekers.  The result is a comprehensive set of materials that are being utilized by our 
partner organizations and volunteer legal workers along the border.  Development of these new 
materials has taken significant time on the part of our program team, who has had to turn away 
from their existing work on behalf of immigrants at program sites throughout the United States, 
and requires time of our web developer, who created and is maintaining a secure page to host 
these materials.  Our legal and program staff is also devoting time to developing training 
materials, related to both the new technology tool and the complex in-flux state of asylum law, 
for our partner organizations to use with volunteer legal workers.   
13. 
The development, and continued refining, of these materials continues to be a 
priority for us because of the misinformation that has spread at the border.  Even with the TRO 
in place, the announcement of the Proclamation and the regulation has created significant 
confusion and misreporting on the ground regarding asylum eligibility and immigration options.  
This makes accurate, and constantly updated, materials on asylum eligibility crucial so that 
asylum seekers are able to make informed decisions about their legal options and the 
corresponding consequences of their choices.   
14. 
Our staff has also been intimately involved in implementing use of these new 
materials and resources on the ground.  Our Program Director, Ian Philabaum, has spent several 
days a week, on a weekly basis, in a consulting and support role across the border. This involves 
coordinating and conducting workshops with asylum seekers, developing and adapting materials 
on-site, and training partners and volunteers who are providing legal and humanitarian assistance 
in the border regions.  Other program staff have traveled to the border and will continue to do so 
over the coming weeks.  This in-person travel—which would not have been required absent the 
complex situation on the ground at the border fueled by the new policy—is not only expensive 
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for our small organization, but also takes staff away from existing responsibilities and 
obligations at their program sites.  For example, Ian runs our BorderX program at several 
detention centers throughout the United States, and, before implementation of the Proclamation 
and rule, he was preparing to increase capacity of BorderX’s existing sites and expand the 
program’s presence to several new detention centers.  Since he has been forced to turn his 
attention to the effects of the Proclamation and regulation at the border, the programmatic 
expansion is on hold; volunteer recruitment and training has slowed; and BorderX has had to 
lessen its caseload.   In our Centers of Excellence sites, program staff have had to delay the 
rollout of a pro se workshop series, cancel and reshuffle client appointments, and postpone 
trainings of pro bono attorneys and volunteers in our Court Watch programs.  All of these delays 
and postponements negatively affect our existing asylum-seeking clients within the United 
States, as they are prevented from accessing information and legal services that help them fight, 
and win, their removal defense cases.   
15. 
Finally, the Proclamation and rule have, and would, frustrate Law Lab’s ability to 
represent non-detained asylum seekers at our program sites throughout the country. Law Lab has 
recently taken a leading role in launching the Equity Corps, which is Oregon’s first government-
funded program providing representation for immigrants in removal proceedings.  As the 
program’s “Clearinghouse,” we coordinate the screening and placement of eligible cases with 
participating legal service providers, and provide technical assistance and case expertise in 
complex removal defense cases.  The vast majority of Equity Corps cases to date are defensive 
asylum claims, and most of the defensive asylum claims involve asylum seekers who did not 
cross at a port of entry.   
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16. 
The Proclamation and regulation frustrate our ability to serve individuals who 
crossed between ports because, under the policy, they are no longer eligible for asylum.  As a 
result, under the Proclamation and regulation, we would be forced to provide additional 
particularized guidance and support to both the intake workers and the legal service providers 
who work with these clients.  Developing this guidance and delivering it will take time away 
from our other programs.  We also would have to devote significant time and resources to 
defending what would otherwise be more straightforward asylum claims.  For example, our staff 
attorney has already had to devote additional time to screening eligible cases, and to developing 
training materials that articulate the various eligibility scenarios for Equity Corps clients. In 
particular, if these clients are unable to access asylum, they will instead have to apply for 
withholding and Convention Against Torture relief, which are far more time consuming to 
pursue because of the higher standard for these forms of relief and the corresponding additional 
legal research and fact-gathering. Additionally, a significant percentage of Equity Corps clients 
are asylum-seeking families.  Because asylum allows family members derivatives, we are usually 
able to present a single asylum application for a family unit; in a withholding-only world, we 
would have to prepare separate applications for each family member.  The increased time 
required per case will prevent Equity Corps from serving as many clients as it would have been 
able to absent the Proclamation and regulation. 
17. 
We also cannot shift to providing representation only to people who enter at ports 
of entry.  This would be inconsistent not only with our mission, which is to serve all asylum 
seekers, but also with our contracts, as Equity Corps is a universal representation program that 
does not allow us to pick and choose our clients.  
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18. 
In sum, as anticipated, Law Lab’s work has been significantly affected by the 
implementation of the regulation.   
I hereby declare under the penalty of perjury pursuant to the laws of the United States 
that the above is true and correct to the best of my knowledge. 
EXECUTED this 4th day of December, 2018. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Stephen W. Manning, OSB #013373 
 
 
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