LA Times Article
The LA Times reports that the Justice Department has been promoting Republican loyalists as immigration judges. We know what it means to have party hacks running FEMA or the Iraq reconstruction effort. This diary examines what it means to have immigration judges who "do a heck of a job".
A few years ago I was a volunteer in a prison. I knew a man from Africa, Robert, who was in this country illegally from Africa. In Africa his tribe was being destroyed by a neighboring tribe. He told me of the rape and torture and murder going on.
So as soon as his prison term was up, he was set to be deported back to his country in Africa. Robert's cousin had written to him saying that upon his return, the authorities would turn him over to this tribe and he would likely be tortured before he was murdered.
Needless to say, Robert was terrified and was willing to do almost anything (including committing new crimes in prison) to avoid deportation. In his mind, this was truly a life and death situation.
His life was in the hands of an immigration judge who would decide whether to grand asylum or send him back to the waiting arms of his neighboring tribe.
I lost track of Robert and don't know how the story ended. But reading the LA Times article about how completely unqualified the immigration judges are sends a cold chill through me.
Robert's fate, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of others with huge, life-altering immigration issues rests in the hands of immigration judges who had been screened by Monica Goodling for their "political credentials and loyalty to the Republican Party in possible violation of civil service laws..."
Ms. Goodling did not worry too much about experience in immigration law. It appears that her primary purpose was to advance loyal Bushies to any position she could find. Ability? Who cares?
Included in the latest crop of immigration judges is the former Treasurer of the Louisiana Republican Party, a former campaign treasurer of Senator Judd Gregg, a former GOP congressional aide who had tracked voter fraud issues for the DOJ, a Texan who had been appointed by then-Gov. Bush to the state library commission, and a prosecutor who specialized in obscenity.
The headlines give us examples nearly every day of how unqualified people have responsible positions due to their loyalty. The extremely poor performance in Iraq and New Orleans and many other places have been well documented.
But for people like Robert, who are facing a terror that we can only imagine in our nightmares, the primacy of loyalty over competence is something that he would expect in his home country, but not the United States.