The Department of Justice (DOJ) claims Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s new quota system for immigration judges is “to encourage efficient and effective case management while preserving immigration judge discretion and due process,” but what it really amounts to “is an affront to judicial independence and the due process of law,” former immigration judge Bruce Einhorn, adjunct professor of immigration, asylum and refugee law at Pepperdine, writes in an extraordinary op-ed:
Under the Trump-Sessions plan, each immigration judge, regardless of the nature and scope of proceedings assigned to him or her, will be required to complete 700 cases in a year to qualify for a “satisfactory” performance rating. It follows that only judges who complete more, perhaps many more, than 700 cases per year will qualify for a higher performance rating and, with it, a possible raise in pay.
Essentially, the administration’s plan is to bribe judges to hear and complete more cases regardless of their substance and complexity, with the corollary that judges who defy the quota imposed on them will be regarded as substandard and subject to penalties. The plan should be seen for what it is: an attempt to undermine judicial independence and compel immigration judges to look over their shoulders to make sure that the administration is smiling at them.
Essentially, an unofficial member of Donald Trump’s administration, financially rewarded if they efficiently carry out his dark vision of ethnic cleansing and tearing immigrant families apart, no matter how long they’ve been here, no matter the U.S. citizen kids they’ll leave behind, and no matter if they had no criminal record at all. “This is a genuine threat to the independence of the immigration bench,” Einhorn writes.
This new system is exactly why America’s most racist Keebler elf has continued to put up with months of abuse from Trump. Sessions’s war on immigrants and people of color stretches back decades, to when he was a U.S. senator and along with his former aide, the ghoulish white supremacist and current White House aide Stephen Miller, helped derail comprehensive immigration reform in Congress. Now as attorney general, Sessions’s brutal war is in the immigration courts, and it is a danger to the justice system.
Einhorn writes that “federal laws do not guarantee respondents in removal hearings a right to counsel, and a majority of those in such hearings are compelled to represent themselves before immigration judges, regardless of the complexity of their cases.” According to the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, “an immigrant with a lawyer is seven times more likely than one without an attorney to win the right to stay in the U.S.,” but in speeding up proceedings, the administration makes it less likely for an immigrant to be able to access legal help:
As a judge, I swore to follow the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that “no person” (not “no citizen”) is deprived of due process of law. Accordingly, I was obliged to conduct hearings that guaranteed respondents a full and reasonable opportunity on all issues raised against them.
My decisions and the manner in which I conducted hearings were subject to review before the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals and U.S. courts of appeals. At no time was my judicial behavior subject to evaluation based on how quickly I completed hearings and decided cases. Although my colleagues on the bench and I valued efficiency, the most critical considerations were fairness, thoroughness and adherence to the Fifth Amendment. If our nativist president and his lapdog of an attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have their way, those most critical considerations will become a relic of justice.
“The Trump administration’s intention is clear: to intimidate supposedly independent judges to expedite cases, even if it undermines fairness—as will certainly be the case for pro se respondents,” Einhorn continues. “Every immigration judge knows that in general, it takes longer to consider and rule in favor of relief for a respondent than it does to agree with ICE and order deportation. The administration wants to use quotas to make immigration judges more an arm of ICE than independent adjudicators.” He concludes: ”In my many years on the immigration bench, I learned that repressive nations had one thing in common: a lack of an independent judiciary. Due process requires judges free of political influence. Assembly-line justice is no justice at all.”
