Los Angeles Times (Editorial-California)
August 26, 2015
Over
the last 10 years, the workload of the federal immigration court system
has increased by 146% to an astounding 453,948 active cases at the end
of July. The average
amount of time each of those cases has been pending: 627 days. Some
have been lingering for years.
People who have no legal right to be in the country get lengthy reprieves simply because the judges can't get to their cases.
The
reason for the enormous backlog is clear. While the government has
poured money into enhancing border security — the number of border
agents has nearly doubled to
21,000 in the last decade — it has failed to similarly increase the
capacity of the immigration court system that hears deportation cases.
According to a recent report, immigration enforcement budgets increased
300% from 2002 through 2013, but immigration
court budgets rose only 70%.
The
ramifications of such an overwhelmed system are wide-ranging. People
who have no legal right to be in the country get lengthy reprieves
simply because the judges can't
get to their cases. Those with legitimate claims to asylum are left
twisting in the wind. The longer a case drags out, the harder it is to
verify or refute an immigrant's claim. And the judges face significant
stress and burnout. They handle an average of
1,400 cases each per year, more than twice the caseload for Social
Security and Veterans Affairs administrative law judges. Under such
pressure, judges complain they have insufficient time to research legal
points in the immigration laws, which rival tax codes
for complexity.
Immigration
judges are part of the Justice Department's Executive Office for
Immigration Review, whose current budget includes 319 judicial
positions, only 247 of which
are filled (and 130 of those judges will be eligible to retire at the
end of September). President Obama has asked for an additional 55 "judge
teams" (a judge and seven court staffers) in the upcoming budget, but
advocates say that the increase would be insufficient
to clear the backlog and stay ahead of the constant flow of new cases —
well over 200,000 a year. Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the
National Assn. of Immigration Judges, estimates it would take an
additional 100 judges, a number seconded by a separate
report from the American Bar Assn. The bipartisan Senate immigration
reform bill (which the House failed to pass two years ago) would have
added 225 positions over three years.
Congress'
failure to overhaul the nation's immigration system has been a
long-running embarrassment. But this is one fix that should be
relatively easy. Politicians, particularly
Republicans, love to rail about the need to better enforce immigration
law. But it takes courts and judges to do that, and without proper
staffing, Congress has set up the system to fail.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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