Immigration plan draws critics

Judges push back, saying quotas will slow process

Judges balk at attorney general’s plan to speed up deportation rulings.

WASHINGTON — The nation’s 58 immigration courts long have been the ragged stepchild of the judicial system — understaffed, technologically backward and clogged with an evergrowing 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 to 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 Burman, secretary of the National Association of Immigration Judges, a voluntary group that represents judges in collective bargaining.

Cases already move at a glacial pace. Nationwide, the average wait for a hearing date in immigration court is about two years, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University.

But some jurisdictions are much slower. The immigration court in Arlington, Va., where Burman is a judge, has a four-year backlog, meaning hearings for new cases are being scheduled in 2022. Burman said the reality is far worse — the docket says he has 1,000 cases scheduled to begin on the same day in 2020.

President Donald Trump complained about immigration courts during an event Thursday in West Virginia, saying inaccurately that immigrants “are supposed to come back in two or three years for a court case, but no one comes back.”

Statistics show a large majority of people show up for court hearings.

Immigration judges conduct administrative proceedings to determine if immigrants charged with violating immigration law should be deported or allowed to remain in the country.

Unlike criminal courts, defendants in immigration court who don’t hire lawyers are not provided with public defenders. That includes the nearly 90,000 minors who crossed the border without their parents.

For the Trump administration, the courts’ slow pace is a serious obstacle to attempts to increase deportations. But fixing the courts won’t be easy.

Everyone agrees more judges are needed. But putting them on the bench is itself a lengthy process. A 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office said it took more than two years, on average, to hire an immigration judge.

After a concerted effort to streamline the process, hiring now takes about 10 months, according to Devin O’Malley, a Justice Department spokesman. He said the system now has 334 judges, up from 247 in 2015, but more than 100 positions are still vacant.

Sessions has called for ending 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.

Immigration courts also help adjudicate asylum claims. Under the law, immigrants may apply for asylum if they have suffered persecution, or have a credible fear of persecution, for such criteria as race, religion and political opinion. About 80 percent of applicants are allowed to stay while their asylum claims are reviewed.

Sessions has said that many asylum seekers are abusing the system by filing unsubstantiated claims so they can stay pending a hearing.

But Sessions has begun changing the system. Last month, he decided that immigration judges could dismiss asylum claims without a hearing, and announced he would consider whether being a crime victim would be eligible to make a legitimate claim for asylum.

Immigration advocates fear Sessions ultimately will seek to prevent victims of gang violence or domestic abuse from winning asylum claims.

Sessions’ latest plan, scheduled to begin Oct. 1, will set performance goals for immigration judges, starting with completing 700 cases each year and resolving the vast majority quickly.

Immigration advocates say the answer is more resources: more judges, more clerks, and legal representation for immigrants. They also say the courts should be independent, not under the Justice Department.

“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.

“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.

CAROLYN KASTER/AP 2017 Attorney General Jeff Sessions has set performance goals for immigration judges, including completing 700 cases a year.