TAL @ CNN: EVIDENCE MOUNTS OF SESSIONS’S ILLEGAL POLITICIZED HIRING OF IMMIGRATION JUDGES — Best Qualified Individuals Need Not Apply? – Is He Looking For Hacks Who Share His White Nationalist Bias? – When Is Congress Going To Create An Article I Court?

Immigration judge applicant says Trump administration blocked her over politics

By Tal Kopan, CNN

When the Obama administration offered Thea Lay a chance to serve as one of the nation’s top immigration judges pending a successful background check, she eagerly accepted.

But the Trump administration withdrew her offer this year with little explanation after months of silence — and she suspects it’s because of her political ideology.

Lay’s case is one of several being questioned by House Democrats, who have accused the Justice Department of political bias in hiring judges to serve on the nation’s immigration courts — which would be against the law. And the suspicion of politically based hiring, even if unfounded, belies the greater criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ broader efforts to speed up the immigration courts and use his authority as attorney general to single-handedly interpret immigration law.

Lay has spent much of her 25-year career working on the exact type of asylum law Sessions recently reinterpreted by rolling back protections for domestic violence victims, and she worries that she was perceived as having an ideology that would not be welcome on the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The Justice Department forcefully denies that political ideology has been a factor in any of its hiring of immigration judges, including the decision on Lay, citing federal laws which say it cannot be. They say Lay declined a temporary appointment to the position and cite that and a subsequent reevaluation of the salary for the position as the reason for her rejection.

But the questions about whether there was a quiet move away from candidates who were perceived as too pro-immigrant is an illustration of the unique position the attorney general holds, as the political appointee who hires, manages and can single-handedly overrule each of the nation’s immigration judges.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/politics/immigration-judge-applicant-says-trump-administration-blocked-her-over-politics/index.html

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Sessions is fortunate that the “Do-Nothing” GOP has control of both Judiciary Committees. But, some day the truth will out. And, given Sessions’s already well-established record of lies, distortions, and misrepresentations, it could be pretty ugly.

PWS

06-22-18

 

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