http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-immigration-courts-20180406-story.html
Joseph Tanfani reports for the LA TIMES:
The nation’s 58 immigration courts long have been the ragged stepchild of the judicial system – understaffed, technologically backward and clogged with an ever-growing backlog of cases, more than 680,000 at last count.
But a plan by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, a longtime immigration hawk, aimed at breaking the logjam and increasing deportations of immigrants in the country illegally has drawn surprising resistance from immigration judges across the country.
Many say Sessions’ attempts to limit the discretion of the nation’s 334 immigration judges, and set annual case quotas to speed up their rulings, will backfire and made delays even worse — as happened when previous administrations tried to reform the system.
“It’s going to be a disaster and it’s going to slow down the adjudications,” warned Lawrence O. Burman, secretary of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, a voluntary group that represents judges in collective bargaining.
Cases already move at a glacial pace. Nationwide, the average wait for a hearing date in immigration court is about two years, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University.
But some jurisdictions are much slower. The immigration court in Arlington, Va., where Burman is a judge, has a four-year backlog, meaning hearings for new cases are being scheduled in 2022. Burman says the reality is far worse — the docket says he has 1,000 cases scheduled to begin on the same day in 2020.
. . . .
Another problem: Poorly funded immigration courts still use paper files, slowing access to information, while other federal courts use digital filing systems.
The Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department office that oversees the courts, started studying the problem in 2001. It has issued numerous reports and studies over the last 17 years, but accomplished little in the way of computerized record keeping.
. . . .
The judges don’t see it that way. Burman and other leaders of the immigration judges’ association, in an unusual public protest, say Sessions’ plan will force judges to rush cases and further compromise the courts’ already battered reputation for fairness.
“Clearly this is not justice,” said the association president, Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, who sits in Los Angeles, the nation’s busiest immigration court. The plan will “undermine the very integrity of the court.”
Sessions is not the first U.S. attorney general to try to push deportation cases through the system faster.
John Ashcroft, who served under President George W. Bush, unveiled a streamlined approach in 2002, firing what he called softhearted judges from the 21-member Board of Immigration Appeals, the highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws.
The result was an increase of cases sent back by federal courts, which reviewed the decisions – and more delays.
Under the Obama administration, immigration judges were ordered to prioritize old cases to try to clear the backlog. But after thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America surged to the southwest border in 2014, they were told to focus on those cases instead. As the dockets were reshuffled, the backlog kept growing.
Last fall, Sessions ordered 100 immigration judges from around the country to travel to courts on the border to move cases quickly. The Justice Department pronounced it a success, saying they finished 2,700 cases.
Some of the judges were less enthusiastic.
“We had nothing to do half the time,” said Burman, who spent eight weeks in border courts. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but they sent more people than they needed to” while his caseload in Virginia languished for those two months.
Immigration advocates say the answer is more resources: more judges, more clerks, and legal representation for immigrants. They also say the courts should be independent, not under the Justice Department.
“Everybody wants to hear there’s some magical solution to make all this fine. It’s not going to happen,” said Paul Schmidt, a former immigration judge and former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals.
“If you’ve got a system that is producing defective cars, making the system run faster is just going to result in more defective cars,’ he said.
Staff writer Brian Bennett contributed to this report.
******************************************
Go on over to the LA Times at the above link for Joseph’s complete article.
Those of us in the Immigration Courts at the time of the “Ashcroft debacle” know what a complete disaster it was from a due process, fairness, and efficiency standpoint. Far too many of the cases were returned by the Article III Courts for “redos” because Immigration Judges and BIA Members were encouraged to “cut corners” as long as the result was an order of removal.
Some judges resisted, but many “went along to get along.” Some of the botched cases probably still are pending. Worse, some of the botched, incorrect orders resulted in unjust removals because individuals lacked the resources or were too discouraged to fight their cases up to the Courts of Appeals. And, the Courts of Appeals by no means caught all of the many mistakes that were made during that period. Haste makes waste. I analogized it to being an actor in a repertory theater company playing the “Theater of the Absurd.” Now, Sessions is promoting a rerun of another variation on that failed theme.
Somebody needs to fix this incredibly dysfunctional system before shifting it into “high gear.” And, it clearly won’t be Jeff Sessions.
PWS
04-07-18