The move of the Ministry of Justice last week to dismiss at least eight immigration judges, including four from California, raises fears of democratic leaders, academics and others that the Trump administration reprimands protections for a regular procedure for immigrants.
“These layoffs made no sense,” said Matt Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union representing the country’s 700 immigration judges. “When you do the simple calculations, each judge makes 500 to 700 cases per year. Most of them are cases of expulsion. So what he did indeed, is that he has increased the already huge backlog with which the immigration courts are confronted.”
The Executive Office of Immigration Review, or Eoir, which heads the Immigration Court system, dismissed at least two dozen additional immigration judges and to supervise judges in February, including five of the courts of California, according to the Union of Judges. The administration also eliminated five management positions from the Eoir and deleted nine Judges of Appeal of the Board of Directors appointed under the President Biden. 85 other staff members of the professional court – including 19 judges, interpreters, legal assistants and IT specialists – took buybacks after receiving a “Road fork” email which offered federal workers “deferred resignations”.
In a memo sent after the February layoffs, the acting director of the Eoir, Sirce E. Owen, said that the immigration judges did not have “several layers of dismissal restrictions” or the protection of the public service which had already been given to them.
She referenced the declarations of the chief of staff of the Ministry of Justice, Chad Mizelle, according to which the agency restored “responsibility so that executive officials respond to the president and the people”.
“The unleashed and constitutionally non -responsible judges (judges of administrative law) have exercised immense power for too long,” said Mizelle.
Biggs hypothesized that the judges appointed to replace those who left could be “political loyalists”.
“Do they intend to dismiss immigration judges because they do not govern cases like Donald Trump wants them to govern? He asked.” You can easily see a scenario where it could happen. “”
Thirteen judges who were in probation status made a class call to the US Merit System Protection Board in Atlanta, saying that they had been wrongly interrupted.
The Ministry of Justice did not respond to requests for comments.
Unlike the federal district courts, the immigration courts do not have the same level of judicial independence and their decisions can ultimately be canceled by the American prosecutor, although previous administrations have not widely used this power, said Alison Peck, author of “accidental history of the American immigration courses: war, fear and roots of dysfunction”.
Legal researchers claim that changes should be considered in the greater context of administration’s efforts to accelerate the abolition of immigrants. This month, the Eoir called on the judges to terminate cases of asylum in which the requests were deemed “legally deficient”. The police note allows judges to relax and close business without audiences.
“They experience different ways to expel immigrants,” said Sameer Ashar, a clinical law professor at UC Irvine. He underlined three recently detained university students who were taken to a distant detention center in Louisiana, where they do not have easily access to the performance. The administration invoked a law in wartime to expel dozens of additional people who were presumed to be members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren of Aragua, in Salvador last month.
“We must consider all these efforts as experiences – in their efforts to provide an accelerated referral to everyone, to the whole system,” said Ashar. “This is part of the attack on the administration against the extension of the regular procedure to immigrants in the United States”
President Trump told the White House journalists on Tuesday that undocumented immigrants should not have been expelled before being expelled.
“We take them out, and I hope we will get the cooperation of the courts because you know, we have thousands of people ready to go out, and you cannot have a lawsuit for all these people,” He said.
The comments followed the articles on social networks on Monday on which he made similar declarations, rushing to the Supreme Court after having ordered a temporary break on deportations under the Act respecting extraterrestrial enemies.
“We cannot make up for everyone, because it would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he wrote. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of illegals that we send from the country. Such a thing is not possible to do. ”
Immigration courts are bottlenecks with 3.7 million cases pending. In California, according to access to transactional files at the University of Syracuse Clearinghouse
Database, there are nearly 400,000 cases pending, with the greatest backlog in the state in San Francisco, where three judges were withdrawn, and the second largest in Concord, where three other judges were deleted.
The backlog, explains Lora Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, is partly due to the many hearings and extensions associated with immigration cases which can flow for years. Administration is right to accelerate them, she said.
“The quantity of regular procedure that the expensive extraterrestrials obtain is what I would say, excessive,” she said.
The members of the Senate and the Judicial Committees of the Chamber, Senator Dick Durbin (D-ill.) And representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), as well as dozens of other Democrats, urged the administration to reverse the course in a letter sent in March. They asked us Atty. General Pam Bondi explains the logic of the administration for having dismissed so many judges and to expose the depth of the cuts inside the agency.
The legislators have written that the absence of experienced assistant chief judges affects the most urgent judicial affairs – such as those who deal with people, families and children detained to credible fears to return to their country of origin – and slow down all the audiences for migrants who apply for Mexico, by virtue of the remaining policy in Mexico.
“These changes will reduce the quality of the decisions of immigration cases and the speed at which immigration cases are judged,” said the letter. One of the licensed judges was in the midst of an asylum hearing and received an opinion by e-mail and had to suddenly leave the procedure, indicates the letter.
Bondi has not yet responded, according to representatives of Durbin and the American senator Alex Padilla, member of the classification of the Senate’s judicial immigration subcommittee.
“This is another tactic in the anti-immigrant program of the Trump administration and the mass deportation that is trying to reshape our immigration system, in particular by denying regular procedure by increasing the delays for people waiting for their day in court,” said Padilla in a statement in Times. “The courts have long struggled to follow an increasing backlin of affairs due to political interference over the years. This last dismissal of immigration judges and members of professional staff only worse. ”
Inside the judicial system, people are nervous, said Kerry Doyle. Appointed during the Biden administration as a lawyer for immigration and customs, Doyle was about to finish a one-year judge training program in the Massachusetts in February when she received an email that she would be released.
Before being chosen as a judge, she had been the target of the conservative groups. The American Accountability Foundation, a Heritage Foundation project, placed Doyle on a “DHS bureaucrat surveillance list” which aimed to exhibit career staff in “the league with left -wing border groups”.
“He really struck the other judges of my former court that I was dismissed,” she said. “People do really very difficult work and work really hard, and it is very difficult to concentrate and do your job when you are not sure day by day if you will always be there, or to have the impression that things are going on and that you do not know why or what can happen.”
California Daily Newspapers
