Faith & Values & Immigration Reporter
Columbus Dispatch
https://apple.news/AbprF_RZWSBmtsn5WT35I_w
By DANAE KING, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Immigration court backlog has nearly doubled under Trump
November 25, 2019 05:00 PM EST
The nation’s backlog of active immigration court cases has surpassed the 1 million mark and has nearly doubled since President Donald Trump took office, a new analysis shows. In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland’s immigration court, which includes Columbus-area cases. That’s up from 3,295 in 2009.
While most people might look a few weeks into the future when scheduling appointments for work, Amy Bittner has put court dates on her calendar for 2022.
The Columbus-based immigration lawyer already knows she’ll have to make the 280-mile round trip to Cleveland to represent a client at a hearing in three years.
“The backlog is a victim of this administration’s priorities. There did not used to be this backlog,” Bittner said.
Nationwide, the backlog has almost doubled, from 542,411 pending cases when President Donald Trump took office in January 2017 to just over 1 million as of Sept. 30, according to an October report by TRAC, a Syracuse Universityclearinghouse that gathers and analyzes immigration data from government agencies.
In Ohio, 12,851 cases are pending in Cleveland Immigration Court, the state’s only such court. That is up significantly from 3,295 in 2009. It’s also double the 6,184 in 2016.
Hearings are scheduled in the Cleveland court through Dec. 30, 2022.
Trump administration policies have not helped temper the rise in the country’s immigration court backlog, the TRAC report says.
Austin Kocher, a faculty fellow at TRAC and an Ohio State alumnus , said such backlogs result when “the government focuses concern on immigrants and puts enforcement ahead of due process and civil rights.”
“Very little resources actually go to the immigration court system and judges” compared with enforcement efforts, Kocher said.
Although the judges in northeastern Ohio stay busy, the backlog at Cleveland’s immigration court isn’t the worst in the country. In areas such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, immigrants are waiting an average of 1,450 days, or just under four years, to see a judge.
Part of the reason for the backlog, TRAC says, is that then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in May 2018 ordered the nation’s immigration judges to end their practice of removing cases from their dockets without issuing decisions. That resulted in formerly closed cases being reopened, according to TRAC.
“The decision to reopen previously closed cases has single-handedly exacerbated the immigration court crisis, yet it has not received sufficient attention,” the TRAC report states. “This single policy decision has caused a much greater increase in the court’s backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum.”
Others blamed the delays in part on one of Trump’s earliest executive orders, from January 2017, when he made every immigrant who was in the country illegally a priority for deportation. The norm had been to prioritize those who had committed crimes.
“It is a senseless waste of taxpayer money to attempt to remove people who are not criminals and who are well-integrated into our community,” Bittner, the Columbus immigration lawyer, told The Dispatch in an email.
She said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should close deportation cases involving long-term U.S. residents who are not dangerous.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Department of Justicebranch that supervises the federal immigration court system, did not respond to requests by The Dispatch for comment.
The backlog has grown despite the Trump administration having given the immigration courts “the greatest amount of resources,” said Judge Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union.
The nation has 442 immigration judges, according to TRAC. Although about 220 judges have been hired in the past three years, about 100 others have left, Tabaddor said. She said that many of those who have left have expressed feeling like the Trump administration doesn’t allow them to do their jobs properly while adding quotas and micromanaging their work.
Each judge has about 2,000 cases, according to TRAC.
In 2016, when Cleveland’s immigration court had three judges, Bittner went to the court only twice. Now it has six judges, and she goes more than once a month.
Hiring more judges hasn’t fixed the backlog, Bittner said.
“It is very frustrating because justice delayed is justice denied, and while foreign nationals wait years for the adjudication of their cases, they are putting down roots here and having families, which makes removal from the United States even crueler if their case is ultimately denied,” Bittner wrote in the email.
She said some of her clients are grateful for the wait because they have more time to build a life here. Others, however, are frustrated, Bittner said, because they feel that they are constantly in limbo, and once they’ve built a life, it could all come crashing down when their day in court finally arrives.
A few of her clients who had waited years to make their asylum case in the U.S. court left for Canada instead, hoping things would go more smoothly up north.
“It just seems to be getting worse,” Bittner said.
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Actually, this article significantly understates the true scope of the backlog. Because, as noted in the article, in Castro-Tum, Sessions unethically, mindlessly, and unlawfully created a situation that, if not halted by the Congress or the Appellate Courts (note the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has “just said no” to Session’s bogus ruling), will require that over 300,000 low priority, properly “administratively closed” cases be restored to the docket. They vast majority of these are (absurdly) themselves backlogged, “awaiting re-docketing” (more than a clerical process in the antiquated, non-automated, paper heavy Immigration Courts). That makes the total backlog well over 1.4 million and still growing every day.” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” at its worst!
And, because of the almost guaranteed legal and quality control problems with the Regime’s “cutting corners to deny due process” approach, many of these will end up in the Circuit Courts of Appeals in a condition that requires “return to sender.”
It doesn’t take a legal scholar or much of a judge to recognize that today’s Immigration “Courts” being run by biased, maliciously incompetent DOJ prosecutors don’t satisfy the basic requirement for “fair and impartial adjudications” to conform to Fifth Amendment Due Process. Moreover, the incompetent, “bad faith” mis-management of the Immigration Courts basically “throws garbage” into the higher courts and precludes effective, timely judicial review.
The solution: recognize that this travesty is unconstitutional and require a court-approved “special master” to run the Immigration Courts in place of the DOJ until Congress fixes the glaring Due Process and court management problems with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court as recommended by almost all experts!
We also must remember the DOJ’s & EOIR’s concerted White Nationalist attacks on foreign nationals and their legal and Due Process rights in the Immigration Courts is also a vicious, unprovoked assault on the courageous attorneys representing the most vulnerable among us and trying, against the odds, to make the system function for everyone’s good. By failing to aid and support “officers of the court” in this dire situation, the Federal Judiciary basically undermines our entire justice system and brings it into disrepute!
Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change!
Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts Never!
PWS
11-26-19