http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-judges-idUSKBN17D2SI
Julia Edwards Ainsley and Kristina Cooke report in Reuters:
“Two U.S. immigration judges recently sent to the Mexico border to process asylum requests from migrant women and children are being recalled as they have so few cases to hear, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The dearth of cases at two Texas facilities where the judges are based can be traced to a sharp drop in illegal border crossings by women and children since U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January.
Eight immigration judges were reassigned from their regular courts to detention centers at the border beginning on March 20 as part of Trump’s executive order to curb illegal immigration.
Six of the judges have had full dockets, handling dozens of cases per week. But the two at detention centers housing women and children in Dilley and Karnes County, Texas had so few cases their presence was deemed a waste of resources by the U.S. Department of Justice, according to one of the sources.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The number of parents and children apprehended at the U.S. Mexico border in March dropped to just over 1,000, a 93 percent fall from December, the Department of Homeland Security reported last week.
The decline follows Trump’s harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration and policies which classify almost all illegal migrants as subject to deportation.
The judges were deployed to the border in an effort to quickly hear the claims of migrants seeking asylum so that those deemed ineligible could be deported.
In more than three weeks at the border, the judge in Dilley had no hearings and the judge in Karnes County had four, according to a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review. [emphasis added].
. . . .
The judges deployed to the border left behind scheduled hearings in their home courts. As of early March, immigration courts were weighed down by a record backlog of more than 542,000 cases.”
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Haste makes waste. Meddling by political officials with no understanding of how the Immigration Court system works and who are not committed to due process and fairness as “mission one” has no place in our U.S. Immigration Court system, or indeed in our American system of justice. America needs an independent Article I Immigration Court now!
To further illustrate how money is being misdirected and due process undermined by the DOJ’s mal-administration of the U.S. Immigration Courts, I have heard “rumors” from several sources that the annual U.S. Immigration Judge Training Conference will be cancelled this year. This is despite some obvious quality control issues, such as gross disparities in asylum grant rates and and a gradual uptick in critical comments about the legal and factual quality of decisions by both trial and appellate judges made by some U.S. Courts of Appeals as they review removal orders. Moreover, with dozens of newly-hired Immigration Judges on board who have never attended a national training conference, there has never been a more critical time for effective, in-person training. While money is being poured down the drain on expensive, unneeded, and inappropriate details of judges, the real needs of the court system are going unmet by the DOJ.
PWS
04/12/17