AS EVIDENCE OF SESSIONS’S BIAS AND INCOMPETENCE TO RUN THE IMMIGRATION COURT SYSTEM MOUNTS, HE “GOES GONZO” ON US IMMIGRATION JUDGES & IMMIGRANTS SEEKING JUSTICE — Dropping All Pretensions That These Are Anything Other Than “Kangaroo Courts,” Gonzo Imposes Assembly Line Quotas That Are Unconstitutional On Their Face!

HERE ARE THE EOIR (SESSIONS) MEMOS:

from Asso Press – 03-30-2018 McHenry – IJ Performance Metrics

 

03-30-2018 EOIR – PWP Element 3 new

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  • Both the BIA and the Federal Courts have found that “case completion goals” can’t be used as the sole basis for denying a continuance. , 531 F.3d 256 (3d Cir. 2008); Matter of Hashmi, 24 I&N Dec. 785 (BIA 2009). Rather, continuance decisions must be made case-by-case on the basis of a careful consideration and weighing of all relevant factors. By purporting to make the mathematical formulas mandatory rather than goals, the Attorney General only compounds the problem.
  • Neither Sessions nor Director McHenry has ever served as a U.S. Immigration Judge. They both are totally unqualified to determine “performance criteria” for judges supposedly exercising “independent judgment and discretion.” Indeed, Sessions was once nominated for a Federal District Judgeship but was found unqualified because of his record of racially tinged bias. He has no business being in change of any judiciary.
  • Numerical quotas simply have no place in a fair judicial system. Having worked with judges in both a supervisory and a collegial capacity for over two decades, my observation is that all good judges do not work at the same pace. Some simply take more time than others to reach a fair result. That doesn’t mean that they are less qualified, less hard-working, or less fair. Indeed in some cases those who take longer to reach a decision are better and more careful judges than those who are more “productive.”
  • The use of appeal statistics is particularly bogus. I had some cases where I was reversed by the BIA only to be vindicated by the Court of Appeals. In other cases, I was reversed by the Court of Appeals for faithfully applying a BIA precedent that was found to be erroneous. I also had cases while I was an appellate judge on the BIA where my dissenting view was ultimately found by the Court of Appeals be correct and the majority’s view erroneous .
  • Justice is not a “widget” that can be subjected to “performance standards” by politicos who are not judges. This is all a “smokescreen.” The real problem plaguing the Immigration Court system starts with unqualified politicos interfering in proper docket management and decision-making by judges. Jeff Sessions is a prime example of all that is wrong with the current Immigration Court system.
  • Contrary to the DOJ’s claim, the National Association of Immigration Judges (“NAIJ”) never agreed to these so-called “performance metrics.” I was actually part of the NAIJ team that negotiated the existing performance evaluation system. We were assured by management at that time that while non-binding “goals and timetables” might be developed by the agency as informal guidance, they were not “numerical quotas” and would not be used in determining individual performance.

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Here’s an article by Tal Kopan @ CNN on the latest memos:

Justice Department rolls out case quotas for immigration judges

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

The Department of Justice has announced it will evaluate immigration judges on how many cases they close and how fast they hear cases, a move that judges and advocates criticize as potentially jeopardizing the courts’ fairness and perhaps leading to far more deportations.

The policy has been in the works for months, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration have been working to assert more influence over the immigration courts, or the separate court system built just for hearing cases about whether noncitizens have a claim to stay in the US.

US law gives the attorney general broad and substantial power to oversee and overrule these courts, as opposed to the civil and criminal US justice system, which is an independent branch of government. In the immigration courts, judges are employees of the Department of Justice.

Sessions has been testing the limits of that authority in multiple ways, and in a memo Friday, the director of the immigration courts informed judges they would now be evaluated on a set of metrics including the speed and volume of cases heard.

The Justice Department says the move is designed to make the system more efficient. The immigration courts have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases, and it can take years for an immigrant’s case to work its way to completion. In that time, the individuals build lives in the US, and critics point to the immigration courts’ backlog as a major factor in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US.

“These performance metrics, which were agreed to by the immigration judge union that is now condemning them, are designed to increase productivity and efficiency in the system without compromising due process,” a Justice Department official said of the memo. The official added that any judges who fail to meet performance goals would be able to present extenuating circumstances to the Justice Department.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/04/02/politics/immigration-judges-quota/index.html

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There are an estimated eleven million undocumented individuals living in the United States. That population has grown up over decades primarily as the result of poorly designed and unrealistically restrictive laws that failed to recognize the need of U.S. employers for immigrant labor and further threw up artificial roadblocks to individuals already in the U.S. obtaining legal status. To claim that the Immigration Courts are a “major cause” of this accumulated undocumented population is simply preposterous.

PWS

04-03-18

Related posts:

  1. HALLOWEEN HORROR STORY: Opaque & Biased Politicized Judicial Hiring Denies Migrants The Fair & Impartial Adjudication To Which They Are Constitutionally Entitled – Given The Generous Legal Standards, A Worldwide Refugee Crisis, & Asylum Officers’ Positive Findings In Most Cases, Asylum Seekers Should Be Winning The Vast Majority Of Immigration Court Cases — Instead, They Are Being “Railroaded” By A Biased System & Complicit Article III Courts!
  2. MULTIPLE ORGANIZATIONS “CALL BS” ON EOIR’S “LIE SHEET” — No Legitimate “Court” Would Make Such a Vicious, Unprovoked, Disingenuous Attack On Asylum Seekers & Their Hard-Working Representatives!
  3. GONZO’S WORLD: WHITE NATIONALIST AG MAKES VICIOUS UNFOUNDED ATTACK ON REFUGEES & THEIR ATTORNEYS THE CENTERPIECE OF HIS SPEECH TO LARGEST CLASS OF INCOMING U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGES — “Good lawyers using all their talents and skills work every day … like water seeping through an earthen dam to get around the plain words of (immigration law) to advance their clients’ interests.”
  4. THE TRUTH IS OUT, THANKS TO MICHELLE MENDEZ @ CLINIC: Practice Pointers on Matter of Castillo-Perez & “Takeaways” From FOIA Trove On In Absentias!