Amid the growing debate over immigration reform, specifically concerning the increasing number of unaccompanied children migrants crossing into the Untied Stats, the White House announced that immigrant children who face imminent and mortal danger in their home countries will likely be allowed to remain in the United States.  

White House Secretary Josh Earnest stated that these children are entitled to due process and will go through the immigration process thereby allowing immigration judges and asylum officials to make the final determination of whether they face a credible threat of death upon return to their home countries.  If immigration officials do in fact determine that a child faces a clear and credible threat of harm upon return to their home country the judge may ultimately find that the child be granted asylum permitting that child to legally remain in the United States.  

Secretary Earnest did mention that the White House is looking for greater authority to more efficiently enforce the current immigration law and expressed the White House's interest in changing the current immigration laws, but few specifics have been offered concerning details of these changes.

The US Senate, on Tuesday, June 24, confirmed Leon Rodriguez as the next Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The director is responsible for administering and processing asylum and refugee applications, immigration benefits, and naturalization and visa petitions.

Mr. Rodriguez previously served as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2011 to the present. Much of his work there involved bringing cases against medical and insurance organizations for violations of HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for breaches of patient information.

In 2011, President Obama nominated Rodriguez to lead the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. However, his nomination was withdrawn because of Republican opposition to his work in the Civil Rights Division. From 2010 to 2011, Mr. Rodriguez served as Chief of Staff and Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice (DOJ), overseeing the division's administrative operations and cases involving discrimination based on national origin and immigration status. Mr. Rodriguez also served as County Attorney for Montgomery County, Maryland from 2007 to 2010. During that time, he also worked for President Obama's Justice Department transition team in 2008 and 2009.

From 2001 to 2007 Mr. Rodriguez was a partner at Ober, Kaler, Grimes, and Shriver in Washington, D.C., again focusing on health care law. He served in the United States Attorney's Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh) from 1997 to 2001, first as Chief of the White Collar Crimes Section from 1998 to 1999 and then as First Assistant U.S. Attorney until his departure. During his tenure at the U.S. Attorney's office in Pittsburgh, Mr. Rodriguez focused primarily on health care fraud. Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney's Office, Mr. Rodriguez was a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at DOJ from 1994 to 1997 and a Senior Assistant District Attorney at the Kings County District Attorney's Office in New York from 1988 to 1994, where he prosecuted cases including some against members of the Colombo and Genovese crime families.

Rodriguez is married to a physician, Dr. Jill Schwartz. They have two children, Talia and Elias. Rodriguez speaks several foreign languages, including Spanish, French, Hebrew and Italian. The son of small business-owning Cuban immigrants who sought refuge from the Castro regime in the U.S., Rodriguez was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1962, where he lived until moving to Miami at the age of 4 with his parents. Rodriguez received a B.A. from Brown University and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. His grandparents moved from Poland and Turkey to Cuba in the late teens and early 20's to escape anti-Semitism, giving Mr. Rodriguez a multi-generational personal experience with immigration that will serve him well as the new Director of USCIS.

Mr. Rodriguez has offered tantalizing insights into how, if approved by the Senate, he might tackle the daunting job of USCIS Director, especially in reply to Sen. Grassley's queries. In written responses to Senator's queries, he reaffirms his belief in the proper use of prosecutorial discretion and the need to protect internal agency whistleblowers from retaliation, agreeing to meet with union representatives of USICS employees and expressing support for recent USCIS reforms of the EB-5 program. He also stated that in limited situations it is incumbent upon the USICS Director to intervene in a pending case when the "outcome of adjudication is wrong, or when adjudication may present a legal, factual, or policy issue of broad application. Regarding the appointment, Jeh Johnson, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said: "We are filling vacancies in senior-level positions in this department and injecting a new energy within its leadership."

In its 15^th annual report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommends that the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list, which tracks and monitors countries with severe violations of religious freedoms, be doubled in size, expanding to include Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and Tajikistan. The USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan watchdog panel created by Congress to review conditions of religious freedoms internationally by analyzing the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom and to make policy recommendations "[g]rounded in and informed by the American experience."

Since 2006, eight countries have been designated on the United States State Department list of "Countries of Particular Concern" (CPCs). The list documents those countries worldwide that engage in clear violations of religious freedoms, and it's unchanged roster for the past eight years has named Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Uzbekistan. Each of these countries undoubtedly engages in systemic and extreme suppression of religious freedoms, but they are far from the only places to display such a record. 

A number of factors influence the appointment of new nations to the CPC list, which defines "severe violations of religious freedom to mean systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom, including violations such as:

a) Torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment;

b) Prolonged detention without charges;

c) Causing the disappearance of persons by the abduction or clandestine detention of those persons; or

d) Other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of persons.

Nations designated as CPC may be subject to further actions, including economic sanctions, by the United States. For this reason, the recommendations made by the USCIRF are delivered to the President and the Secretary of State, who have ultimate jurisdiction controlling whether new states are added to the list.

Over the last 10 years, numerous nations have seen a worsening of their religious freedom climate. Pakistan, according to the USCIRF, "represents the worst situation in the world for religious freedom for countries not currently designated by the U.S. government as "countries of particular concern."  In the past year, conditions hit an all-time low due to chronic sectarian violence targeting mostly Shi'a Muslims but also Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus. 

In Turkmenistan, religious freedom violations persist despite a few limited reforms in 2007. Police raids and harassment of reg­istered and unregistered religious groups continue. The repressive 2003 religion law remains in force, causing major difficulties for all religious groups.

Although USCIRF recommended Vietnam for CPC designation in 2004 and 2005, it withdrew the recommendation in 2006 because of progress toward fulfilling a bilateral agreement to release prison­ers, banning forced renunciations of faith, and expanding legal protections for religious groups. However, Vietnam continues to imprison individuals for religious activity or religious freedom advocacy, and it uses a specialized religious police force and vague national security laws to suppress independent Buddhist, Protestant, Hoa Hao, and Cao Dai activities and to stop the growth of ethnic minority Protes­tantism and Catholicism via discrimination, violence, and forced renunciations of their faith.

Egypt showed some progress during a turbulent political transition, but the Morsi-era government and the interim government failed to protect religious minorities, particularly Coptic Orthodox Christians, from violence. Discriminatory and repressive laws and policies that restrict freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief remain in place under the new constitution. For example, Egyptian courts continue to prosecute, convict and imprison Egyptian citizens for blasphemy.

In the past year, the government of Iraq failed to stem egregious violence by non-state actors against Iraqi civilians, including attacks targeting religious pilgrims and worshippers, religious sites, and leaders, as well as individuals for their actual or assumed religious identity. The Iraqi government took actions that increased, rather than reduced, Sunni-Shi'a tensions stemming from the Syrian crisis, threaten­ing the country's already fragile stability and further exacerbating the poor religious freedom environment. Especially concerning is the draft personal status law that would separately apply to Shi'a Iraqis, which risks further hardening the sectarian divide.

Religious freedom in Syria has been deteriorating dramatically throughout the ongoing conflict between Assad's regime and anti-government elements seeking his overthrow, subjecting the Syrian people to egregious violations of human rights, including freedom of religion or belief. Government forces and affiliated militias have perpetrated religiously-motivated attacks against Sunni Muslim civilians and members of religious minority communities, and have increased sectarian divides through rhetoric and religiously-motivated violence.

Recurring sectarian violence, attacks and threats against Christians by Boko-Haram continue to test Nigeria's democracy, and the misuse of religion by politicians, religious leaders, and others. Religion and religious identity intertwine with ethnic, politi­cal, economic, and social controversies to strain already tense Christian-Muslim relations. While the Nigerian government does not engage in religious persecution, it tolerates severe violations through its fail­ure to bring to justice those responsible for systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations, or to prevent or contain sectarian violence.

Systematic, ongoing, egregious violations of religious freedom continue in Tajikistan. The government sup­presses and punishes all religious activity independent of state control, particularly the activities of Muslims, Protestants, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The government also imprisons individuals on unproven criminal alle­gations linked to Islamic religious activity and affilia­tion. Jehovah's Witnesses have been banned since 2007. There are no legal provisions on conscientious objection to military service.

All of these nations have been recommended for inclusion in previous years, and the State Department, without comment, continually fails to add them to the official CPC list.  Explanations of this course of action include political tensions and the vacancy (since last October) of the office of Ambassador-at-large for religious freedoms. In addition to these countries, USCIRF also recommended the inclusion of 10 "Tier 2" countries, in which religious freedom violations are serious but do not rise to the level of the CPC standard. These countries are Afghanistan, Azerbijan, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, Russia, and Turkey.

Read the Full Report Here... 

Due to the recent surge of unaccompanied children migrants the backlog in Immigration Courts has reached an all-time high.  At the end of June the backlog totaled 375,503 cases, which is an increase of more than 50,000 since the start of the 2013 fiscal year. Specifically the number of juvenile cases has increased to 41,600 and more are anticipated every day. Along with an increase in the backlog, the average wait-time for pending cases has also increased to an average of 587 days.

To view annual backlog trends and the states with the largest backlog per the end of June 2014, see the latest Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) REPORT.