”Justice” Star Chamber
Style
The latest from Garland’s failed EOIR:
05/26/2021 09:40 AM EDT
Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)
Office of Policy, Immigration Law Division
Falls Church, Virginia
Announcement #: EOIR-21-0039
Application Deadline: June 8, 2021The Attorney Advisor provides technical legal advice on the development and implementation of agency-wide policies for all agency functions.
Area of Consideration:
This position is open to Federal Employees.
Duties include but are not limited to the following:
- Drafts and conducts legal reviews of draft regulations, policy directives, and a variety of non-adjudicatory operations.
- Performs comprehensive research regarding newly enacted statutes, proposed Federal legislation and regulations, DOJ regulations, and policy statements; prepares legal memoranda necessary as related to such research.
- Provides sound recommendations in response to a wide range of questions of immigration law and policy involved in the operations of the Agency and the effect of such operations on other activities, Government agencies, industry, and the general public.
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This exchange of comments received at “Courtside” says it all:
Q: Why would this be limited to Federal Employees?
A: No idea. But it doesn’t seem as if they are planning to dismantle McHenry’s Office of Policy. Courts don’t have Offices of Policy to my knowledge.
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No, real “courts” don’t have this bureaucratic nonsense created specifically to suppress judicial independence and to create political influence on what is supposed to be independent, expert judging. It also fed the nonsensical Barr attempt to pass off Immigration Judges (basically reduced to the status of “deportation clerks on an assembly line” under Trump) as “policy officials” to “bust” their union (NAIJ) and keep it from exposing abuses and fighting for judicial independence from political meddling.
I’ve written elsewhere about Garland’s unwillingness to hold Barr and Sessions accountable for their misdeeds. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2021/05/29/dean-erwin-chemerinsky-garlands-failures-justice-go-beyond-immigration-attempting-to-cover-up-your-predecessors-dishonesty-ethical-lapses-possible-criminal-miscondu/
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a retired member of the NAIJ.
“Real courts” might have “Chief Judges,” basically “first among equals” who handle administrative tasks on behalf of their colleagues in addition to performing daily judicial duties. They DON”T have a plethora of “Chiefs, Deputy Chiefs, Chiefs of Staff, Directors, Deputy Directors, Associate Directors, Assistant Chiefs, Unit Chiefs, Executive Assistants, Office Heads, and “Counsel to” many of the foregoing.
As many of us pointed out to the Biden Transition Team, Garland should have “lost” the “bureaucratic, Vatican-style, hierarchical, wasteful, ineffective, bloated bureaucracy” @ EOIR and replaced it with “leaner, progressive, expert judicial leadership” who would:
- See that qualified progressive expert judges were appointed on a merit basis;
- Replace the BIA with qualified, progressive, “practical scholar” judges to provide uniform legal guidance and enforce due process;
- Change the hiring criteria and recruiting practices to encourage diversity and more applicants from the private sector;
- Get a functioning e-filing system and other basic professional support for judges and the public in place;
- Fend off attempts by politicos at the DOJ, DHS, and White House to interfere with judicial independence once qualified progressive judges are in place at EOIR.
If there is any “legal policy” to be made, that’s the job of the BIA, once comprised of practical experts in due process, immigration, and human rights.
If there are “administrative policies” that need to be instituted to improve due process and efficiency, those should be developed by an “Immigration Judicial Conference” composed of sitting judges, BIA Judges, and perhaps Circuit Court Judges, with meaningful dialogue and input from the private sector and the DHS.
Support functions should be coordinated by a lean, professional “Administrative Office” patterned on the “Administrative Office for U.S. Courts” that serves the Article III Judiciary.
There should also be a transparent system, with public members and judges, to handle ethics and conduct complaints about judges.
Additionally, a training function with some model judicial training should be part of the structure.
There is absolutely no need for all the current ridiculous “quotas, ratings, supervision, policy memos, performance work plans, adjudication centers, and other bureaucratic nonsense” that eat up resources without furthering the mission of guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.
Bureaucrats are incapable of phasing out bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. That’s why every day that Garland dawdles in getting in the progressive talent from outside Government necessary to reform EOIR, ditch the bureaucracy, and turn it into a functioning, progressive, model court system is a “killer” — both figuratively and literally!
If there is a single “ask” I would have of Judge Garland, it’s for him to stop thinking like the DOJ bureaucrat he once was and start acting like an independent Federal Judge (which he also once was) constructing a completely new progressive court system designed to be the “world’s best!”
That’s NOT going to happen by mindlessly and wastefully hiring more “insider Attorney Advisors” for a bogus and unnecessary “Office of Policy!”
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!
PWS
05-30-21