Once A Symbol of Fairness, Due Process, & Best Practices, Now Gone “Belly Up”
Stephen Franklin in the Chicago Tribune;
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The Biden administration has signaled that it would like to narrow arrests and deportations to those persons convicted of national security threats and other serious felonies. That would keep many of those, like the fast-food worker in Indianapolis, from immigrant court.
But there’s a bigger challenge facing the Biden administration.
Can it wipe away rules that have fed into a mindset that seemed to take root nationally among some court and immigration enforcement officials?
The rules were meant to erase an immigrant presence in the U.S. And they came to life far away from the nation’s borders in the daily grind of the immigration courts. For well over two years, I sat in Chicago’s immigration court watching, reporting and wondering how his could be happening.
Day by day I watched as the crowds huddled anxiously in the Chicago court’s major waiting room grew. Judges’ caseloads, as listed on the waiting room walls, eventually doubled for some to as many as 100 a day.
Why?
When Trump took office there were 542,411 deportation cases in the nation’s immigration courts. When he left, the number was 1.29 million. The backlog grew as arrests grew, as more were detained, as bonds went up, and new rules raised new hurdles for immigrants in the courts. The average wait for a case in Chicago’s court was 945 days in 2016, and that grew to 1,014 in 2021, 14% higher than the national average.
The long wait perplexed a judge one day as she scanned her computer looking to schedule a new hearing. The best she could find, she told an Iraqi woman in her 80s, was a date four years down the road. The long delay was not lost on the woman’s lawyer’s face. The woman’s husband was not in court because he was facing brain surgery.
A series of canceled hearings left a middle-age Palestinian’s life dangling in the court for seven years. The long delay left him anxious and panicked about the fate of his family back home, where they faced the threat of violence that had already taken several relatives’ lives. He won asylum but several months later, and before he could bring his family to the U.S., his teenage son was killed, a targeted victim of the violence that had haunted him and his relatives.
I took note after the Trump administration said in August 2019 it would push older cases back in 10 courts across the U.S., including Chicago, so that cases involving newly arrived immigrant families could move more rapidly through the courts. It was a clear warning that the U.S. would deal quickly with immigrants arriving at its borders.
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Read the complete op-ed at the link.
The solutions are not rocket science. As many of us have suggested they include:
- New leadership at EOIR firmly committed to judicial independence, due process, best practices and competent judicial Administration;
- New judges at the BIA — “practical experts” in asylum and immigration laws committed to due process, fair application of the law, and humane treatment of individuals;
- Slash the docket immediately to manageable levels by removing aged cases that would fit the legalization proposals in the Biden Bill or where relief could be granted by USCIS;
- Get recent arrivals represented and decide their cases on a fair, reasonable, timely, predictable schedule (e.g., end “Aimless Docket Reshuffling”);
- Establish and implement merit-based criteria for recruitment and retention of judges.
It won’t happen without new personnel and different attitudes. There’s plenty of talent out here to rebuild a high-quality, expert, due-process oriented immigration judiciary. Judge Garland and his team just have to move out those who have created and furthered dysfunction and replace them with better-qualified pros who can get the job done for American justice and the millions of individuals whose lives, hopes, and futures are tied up in the EOIR mess !
Article I is the ultimate solution! But, Judge Garland can start making long overdue changes the day he is sworn in as AG (probably later this week). The only question: Will he?
A Better EOIR For A Better America!🇺🇸It’s not rocket science!🚀
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever!
PWS
03-08-21