Judges question plans for immigration courts
Attorney General Jeff Sessions aims to reduce courts' backlog
WASHINGTON — The nation’s 58 immigration courts have had problems for a long time: understaffed and facing a growing backlog of cases, more than 680,000 at last count.
But a plan by Attorney General 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 make 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 Association of Immigration Judges, a voluntary group that represents judges in collective bargaining.
Nationwide, the average wait for a hearing is two years, according to Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University.
Sessions has called for ending the use of so-called administrative closures, which allows immigration judges to close removals cases without making a final ruling, thus letting some of the immigrants avoid deportation.
In a speech in December, he criticized the Obama administration for allowing judges to close 200,000 cases in five years. “We are completing, not closing, immigration cases,” Sessions said.
But judges argue that removing their ability to clear the
books of stalled cases will only increase the backlog, not fix the problem.
Sessions’ latest plan, scheduled to begin on Oct. 1, will set performance goals for immigration judges, starting with completing 700 cases each year
and resolving the vast majority quickly.
“This is not a radical goal, but a rational policy to ensure consistency, accountability, and efficiency to our immigration court system,” he said Wednesday in a speech in New Mexico.
A department spokesman said the annual quota is near historic averages and works out to about three cases a day. Administrators understand that “certain cases take a little bit longer,” he said.
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.
“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.