NPR
By Richard Gonzales
February 22, 2015
As
Congress debates the fate of President Obama's immigration policies,
the nation's immigration court system is bogged down in delays
exacerbated by the flood of unaccompanied
minors who crossed the southern border last summer.
The
administration made it a priority for those cases to be heard
immediately. As a result, hundreds of thousands of other cases have been
delayed until as late as 2019.
Even
before this past summer's surge of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum,
the immigration courts were already clogged, says Judge Dana Leigh
Marks, president of the
National Association of Immigration Judges.
"What
is an adjective that describes crisis squared?" she asks. "Crisis times
crisis. We have been operating in crisis mode for years."
There
were too many cases for too few judges, and adding in the cases of the
unaccompanied minors only made matters worse. There are currently more
than 429,000 cases
pending in the courts with just 223 judges.
Marks, who does not speak for the Justice Department, says it's no longer a matter of first case in is the first case heard.
"Now
it's the last cases that come in, the recent border crossers, those
cases are moved as it is to the front of the line," she says. "And that
displaces cases that have
been waiting on the dockets for months or years depending on the court
location."
Lance Curtright, a San Antonio immigration lawyer, says his firm has hundreds of clients who are in limbo.
"Some
of my clients would qualify to get a green card, they can't get it, so
their pathway to citizenship is being delayed," he says. "The anxiety
that they live through
is just remarkable because they don't know if they are going to be
deported or not. It trickles down to their family members, their spouses
and their children as well."
This
story is familiar to Enrique Arevalo, an immigration attorney based in
Pasadena, Calif. He says some of his clients have been waiting years to
legalize their status
and need only a 15-minute hearing for a judge to finally sign off on
their cases. But now they're told they'll have to wait indefinitely.
Arevalo says there's a simple solution.
"Just
like they hire more Border Patrol persons to patrol the border, they
should hire more immigration judges to make this a more expeditious
process," he says. "So expeditious
justice I don't think really exists when it comes to immigration law."
The Obama administration has proposed hiring more immigration judges, but that request is hung up in Congress.
As
the delays mount, the immigration court system faces other problems. By
prioritizing the cases of the unaccompanied minors, the administration
fast-tracked their court
hearings, creating a shortage of lawyers as legal service providers are
swamped with cases.
According
to federal records collected by Syracuse University, there are roughly
60,000 unaccompanied minors in the courts. Less than 30 percent have
lawyers. Without
a lawyer, a minor has a very slim chance of staying in this country.
And even those with a lawyer face another potential obstacle.
"Many
of the children are actually never properly notified of the date when
their court hearing is, and that problem has been going on for months,"
says Ahilan Arulanantham,
an attorney with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.
He
says with the fast-tracking of cases, basic administrative processes
broke down such as providing minors and their families with adequate
notice of their hearings.
"In
many places, what judges are doing is they are ordering the children
deported, in abstentia, without them having appeared in the courtroom,"
he says. "And that is
obviously extremely unfair when they didn't know about the court date
to begin with."
Representatives
of legal service providers have met with administration officials to
discuss the problems of adequately notifying minors of their court
dates. But no immediate
solutions were offered.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment