Sessions is using his power to transform 'immigration courts into a deportation assembly line'

Daily Kos Staff

Friday May 18, 2018 · 9:00 AM PDT

2018/05/18 · 09:00

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 15: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) speaks as Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) listens during the 37th Annual National Peace Officers' Memorial Service May 15, 2018 at the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. The event honors law enforcement officers who lost their lives in the line of duty. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

This is, yet again, another reason why Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III continues to put up with abuse and humiliation from Donald Trump (though he’s no victim himself) and will need to be physically dragged out of the Department of Justice (DOJ) building when his time is up:

Sessions barred the nation’s immigration judges Thursday from putting deportation cases on hold, a practice used in hundreds of thousands of cases of immigrants who needed time to gain legal status or were found to be low priorities for removal.

The procedure known as “administrative closure,” used by immigration judges since the 1980s, “lacks a valid legal foundation,” Sessions said in a decision based on his authority over immigration courts, a branch of his Justice Department.

As if a man who works for Trump gives a shit about the rule of law. Sessions’ “seemingly innocuous procedural move,” immigration attorney David Leopold notes, is designed to undermine due process and fairness for immigrants, and even shove immigrants who may have a path to legal status onto a path to deportation.

The move, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said, is “effectively ensuring that the immigration court system will remain encumbered with massive case backlogs well into the future,” with the group’s president, Annaluisa Padilla, saying that “today's decision represents the first in a series of efforts by the Attorney General to singlehandedly rewrite immigration law."

Sessions has been using his immense authority as attorney general to steadily chip away at judicial independence, issuing a new quota system for immigration judges that has been condemned as “assembly-line justice”:

Immigration advocates also said the practice of administrative closure often offered flexibility. The process is frequently used when an immigrant facing deportation could obtain legal status through another agency, including, for example, whether a person could become eligible for a green card by marrying a United States citizen. The judge may use administrative closure to shelve the case while the Citizenship and Immigration Services evaluates whether the marriage is legitimate.

“Administrative closure gives immigration judges critical flexibility and discretion to make fair, due process-based decisions in deportation cases,” said Mr. Leopold.

But due process also means immigrants have a fighting chance to stay here, and Sessions, a man who once “joked” that he didn’t mind the KKK until he heard they smoked pot, just can’t have that. He can try and disguise his insatiable hunger for the suffering of brown people in the “rule of law” all he wants, but absolutely no one believes him.

“Sessions is using his authority as attorney general to turn the immigration courts into a deportation assembly line,” Leopold continued, “with ICE officers waiting at the exits with open handcuffs in hand.”

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