“The burden on judges could also increase, as dockets swell with more cases and those on the bench come under increasing pressure to render decisions.
“I see this as a pot that is going to boil over and scald everybody,” said Bruce Einhorn, a former immigration judge in Los Angeles. “I just don’t see pragmatically how you can almost double the number of cases without spending huge amounts of money to try to accommodate the dockets of the cases already on schedule and those that will be brought into the system.”
The backlog of cases is not new. It has steadily increased over the past decade — even as fewer immigrants have been apprehended along the Southwest border in recent years. In response, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that oversees the courts, has added more judges, including one to Los Angeles in November. It’s also prioritized juvenile cases in an effort to speed up cases of migrant youth.”
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The full article, at the link, contains a 9-minute audio segment. Does anyone seriously think that adding one Immigration Judge in Los Angeles or “prioritizing” juvenile cases will solve this mess?
Actually, the misguided prioritization of juvenile cases, many of them unrepresented, over longer pending cases of represented individuals is exactly the type of “Aimless Docket Reschuffling” that has created a practically insurmountable backlog in the Immigration Courts, notwithstanding a modest decline in new case receipts and a modest increase in resources. The inability of the DOJ and EOIR to establish an efficient merit hiring system for new Immigrstion Judges and poor planning for additional courtrooms to house new judges has also aggravated the problem.
PWS
01/05/17