Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are sharply criticizing the “brazen politicization and maladministration” of the immigration court system under the Trump administration, telling the Justice Department, which wields complete control over these courts, “The administration’s recent decisions to subvert the normal hiring process to promote partisan judges, and to increase political influence over individual immigration cases, has undermined public confidence in our immigration courts.”
”Nonpartisan observers have raised the alarm about the politicization of immigration courts under the Trump administration,” the nine senators, led by Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, write. “The American Bar Association has noted that the Trump administration has instituted ‘specific executive policies and practices exerting unprecedented levels of control over immigration judges and their job performance [that ] have deteriorated public trust in the immigration court system and undermined judicial independence.’” As CNN noted last year, the deterioration of the immigration court system accelerated under the watch of former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.
“The Justice Department has imposed case quotas, given more power to the director charged with overseeing the courts, reversed rulings, curtailed judges' ability to exercise discretion in some cases and moved to decertify the union of immigration judges,” CNN reported, resulting in immigration judges moving positions or retiring early altogether. “As more policies were issued,” wrote Immigration Judge Ilyce Shugall in the Los Angeles Times after resigning last year, “it became clear that this administration’s attack on immigrants and the independence and functioning of the immigration courts would only get worse.”
The senators criticize the wave of new immigration judges brought in not to fairly oversee what are in many cases life-or-death situations for asylum-seekers and others, but to instead impose the impeached president’s radical views. “Under the Trump administration, once hired, immigration judges receive limited training, and the training they do receive reportedly emphasizes that immigration courts are part of the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts, rather than an independent body,” write the senators, who are, in addition to Whitehouse, Dick Durbin, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Pat Leahy, and Chris Coons.
“One former immigration judge expressed ‘grave concerns’ regarding whether new immigration judges ‘have been appropriately trained to be judges in a professionalized, [truly independent] immigration court,’” they continue. “Another explained that ‘there isn’t even any attempt at a proper training. The whole indoctrination is you’re not judges, you’re really enforcement. You’re really a branch of DHS in robes’ … According to one former immigration judge, the judges’ 2018 annual training conference ‘was profoundly disturbing. Do things as fast as possible. There was an overarching theme of disbelieving aliens and their claims and how to remove people faster.’”
Immigrant rights advocates, legal experts, and immigration judges themselves have for years called for the independence of the immigration court system from the Justice Department, with Judy Perry Martinez, president of the American Bar Association, telling a House subcommittee as recently as last month, “What I have seen personally, and what the ABA has determined through its various projects and studies, is that there are serious challenges to due process in our current immigration court system, judicial independence is at significant risk, and that fundamental change is necessary.”
“The United States deserves an immigration court system that is independent, impartial, and functional,” the senators write, calling on the Justice Department to turn over information on the hiring process of immigration judges, “Copies of all materials for trainings of immigration judges from 2017-present,” and “copies of any documents related to any employment actions taken against immigration judges as a result of their case processing times and quotas.”