Immigration Courts Completely Swamped
National Public Radio does an exemplary job of covering the way our country's immigration laws and enforcement priorities affect immigrants and non-immigrants alike. During yesterday's "All Things Considered" segment NPR produced another revealing and insightful piece examining the degree to which the Bush Administration's immigration enforcement crackdown has completely overwhelmed our immigration courts. Give the full story a listen here.
As the piece points out, over the past new years, the Bush administration's immigration crackdown funded thousands more agents to arrest allegedly illegal immigrants and hundreds more government lawyers to prosecute them. What the Bush administration failed to do, however, is hire the judges necessary to adjudicate (ie., evaluate and rule on) the millions of cases that resulted from the stepped-up enforcement actions.
The sheer numbers involved are staggering: last year 214 immigration judges were asked to adjudicate 350,000 immigration cases. That works out to an average of 1,635 cases for each judge. If the immigration courts operate approximately 255 days per year (factoring in federal holidays), then that means the average immigration judge had to adjudicate over 6 cases per day.
And these cases are no trifling matters. Rather, these judges are almost exclusively dealing with removal (ie., deportation) and asylum claims. As one person during the program put it, "these are the equivalent of death penalty cases, and we're conducting them in a traffic court setting." In other words, despite the judges' heroic best efforts, one could be forgiven for thinking that such a voluminous and overwhelming caseload might not lead to the careful, deliberate and exacting administration of justice.
And, I would argue, one could be forgiven for concluding that the former administration was alright with the idea of judges being rushed, razzed and organizationally at the end of their respective ropes when asked to consider the merits of cases brought by alleged illegal immigrants. This systemic insult to our cherished concept of due process awaits new DHS Director Janet Napolitano. And obviously, during a time when our tax coffers aren't exactly spilling over, it's going to be an enormous challenge for the Obama administration to provide our immigration courts with the resources they need to adequately consider and evaluate these cases. But, for a nation founded by immigrants and built on the backs of immigrants, the least we can do is provide immigrants with a meaningful day in court in front of a judge who isn't at their wits' end. Isn't it?
