There was a gauntlet of other restrictions that blocked Keldy before she had a chance to make her case. According to one special bench ruling that applied only in El Paso, Keldy couldn’t post bond until she submitted the full body of legal evidence for her asylum claim; another local rule forbade her to submit more than a hundred pages of materials in her own defense. When a judge ruled on her request for bond, it was denied based on the low statistical odds that she would eventually get asylum, rather than on the standard criteria of whether she was a flight risk. Unlike criminal defendants,
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