While Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans are promising scorched earth if Democrats try to correct the imbalance of Trump appointees in the federal courts, Trump and his toad-like toady Attorney General William Barr are packing the administrative courts overseeing immigration claims with men in their own mold: namely, white supremacists. Their aim appears to be to deny as many claims as possible as quickly as possible, with due process no longer existing in this system.
Last year, the administration increased the Board of Immigration Appeals from 17 members to 21. These are administrative law judges within the executive branch, not subject to Senate approval. Since then, Barr has added William Cassidy and Earle Wilson. From 1993 to 1999, his first six years as an immigration judge, "Cassidy rejected more asylum seekers than any judge in the nation." Wilson recently beat Cassidy's record. From 2013 to 2018, the average rate of asylum claim approval among judges was 45%. Cassidy's rage was 4.2% and Wilson's 1.9%. The average for the six new judges Barr and Trump have put on the board that considers appeals is less than 20%.
That's one part of Trump's and Barr's attack on the asylum system and immigration courts. They've moved to get rid of the immigration judges' union because it has been critical of Trump's policies. They have also implemented new rules, one that "gives the head of the immigration courts, a political appointee, the power to decide appeals if judges do not hear them quickly enough," and a second that "gives board members more authority to summarily deny appeals without issuing a full opinion."
Cassidy is the judge that decided to deport Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen who doesn't speak Spanish, to Mexico in 2008. Immigration attorney Glenn Fogle said in 2001 that "You could have Anne Frank in front of [Cassidy] and he would say it was implausible that she could have hidden in the house for years and not be caught."
He hasn't changed his assessment, describing to Mother Jones a recent hearing in which Cassidy rejected the claim of a Congolese client who had been tortured and had the scars on his back to prove it. The hearing was conducted over an aging video system and Cassidy said he couldn’t see the scars, so he denied the claim. In 2010, one of Cassidy's asylum denials was overturned because he'd written his ruling before the hearing had even happened.
Cassidy also showed up once in another judge's courtroom, wearing his robes, and proceeded to tell that judge how to handle the hearing. In 2016, Cassidy said an immigrant coming to the border was like "a person coming to your home in a Halloween mask, waving a knife dripping with blood." Fogle also recounted another hearing with Cassidy, when he was representing a former Ethiopian official. "As he was telling his story, Fogle remembers, Cassidy jumped up, turned off the court's audio recorder, and yelled, 'Bullshit!'"
"That's the guy that's going to be adjudicating appeals from other immigration judges," says Fogle, along with six more who have been elevated precisely because they apparently don't believe in immigration. Cassidy appears to be the worst, but Wilson's no treat either, with a pattern of appearing to fall asleep while asylum seekers testify. "In one case, according to an observer from Emory University’s law school, Wilson leaned back with his eyes closed for 23 minutes as an asylum seeker described the murder of her parents and siblings."
That's as symbolic as you can get for an administration turning a blind eye toward desperate people seeking refuge. Unfortunately, it’s not just turning a blind eye: It’s inflicting willful harm.