Judge blasts plan to fast-track immigration, deportation cases
BURLINGAME >> Federal immigration judges are being challenged in “unprecedented ways” under a new Department of Justice policy that will require them to complete 700 cases a year — or risk being fired — in an effort to speed up deportations, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges said Sunday
Calling the policy “indefensible and unreasonable,” Judge Ashley Tabaddor said the quota will take a significant psychological toll on judges and will compromise their judicial values, forcing them to rule on some cases in just a few hours.
“It’s something that would never, never be tolerated in any other court,” Tabaddor told this newspaper Sunday, speaking under her authority as president of the judges’ union. “It pits the judge’s personal interest against that of the parties before them. And that is in violation of every principle that we have when it comes to our court system and our American judicial system.”
The Justice Department couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday. It first notified immigration judges of the quota in a March memo first obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
The policy, which goes into effect Oct. 1, comes amid an aggressive push by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to slash the court backlog in immigration cases in half by 2020. During a speech in Virginia earlier this month in which he welcomed 44 new judges, Sessions was clear about his expectations.
“As you take on this critically important role, I hope that you will be imaginative and inventive in order to manage a high-volume caseload. I do not apologize for expecting you to perform, at a high level, efficiently and effectively,” he said.
The court will have 395 immigration judges by the end of this month, the highest number in the agency’s history and an increase of more than 30 percent since President Trump took office, according to the Washington Post.
The immigration court backlog — which includes deportation hearings and asylum claims — increased by almost one-third under the Trump administration, with 171,656 cases added since the president took office, according to a June report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University. The number of cases awaiting decision reached an all-time high of 746,049 in July, TRAC data shows. The group
analyzes and publishes data it collects on the activities of the U.S. federal government.
Tabaddor, a Los Angeles immigration judge who was speaking Sunday at a conference hosted by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, said that while the backlog and the politics tied to the immigration court system existed before President Trump took office, this administration has taken it to new levels.
“We have quotas and deadlines, we have judges being removed from cases because the Justice Department is not happy with the decisions that they’re making.
… That kind of interference with the decision-making authority of the judges is frankly unprecedented,” she said.
Tabaddor, whose own family fled Iran in the early 1980s after the Iranian revolution, served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California in Los Angeles and was a trial attorney with the Justice Department’s Civil Division in Washington, D.C.
She called on Congress Sunday to free immigration judges from the Justice Department’s grip and allow them to work independently. Unlike the judicial branch, federal immigration courts report to the attorney general under the executive branch.
“This design flaw, this
fundamental defect of having our immigration court in the Justice Department, headed by a top federal prosecutor, needs to come out and needs to be corrected,” she said.
The Trump administration told the Washington Post on Friday that it “has been clear that the proper home for the immigration court system is with the Department.”
A Justice Department spokesman told the Post that the administration is seeking to slash the 740,000-case backlog in half by 2020 “with collaboration — not obstruction and intentional undermining — from the immigration judge union.”