Thread: As immigration judges' working conditions worsen, more may choose retirement

August 18, 2015
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske contact the reporter

Immigration Judge Eliza Klein had more than 20 years' experience hearing cases in Boston, Miami and, most recently, Chicago when a surge of immigrants arrived last summer. In addition to the backlog of cases she already faced, Klein started seeing more Central American youths seeking asylum.

“I just really didn't like telling these young kids they had to go back to this situation. It really was very stressful for me and distressing,” she said. “I started out my career representing people with asylum claims, and a lot of those were Central American. I didn't want to sign my name on something and send someone back somewhere where they could potentially lose their life.”

Klein, 62, was also a mother with a daughter finishing college.

“I had teenagers from Honduras crying to me, ‘Why am I in jail? I didn't do anything wrong.’ I had to explain to people why, but I couldn't justify it. I couldn't say that to these kids,” Klein said.

In January, she retired.

There are 247 immigration judges in 58 courts nationwide, and more than half of them, 130, are eligible to retire this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

The U.S. attorney general appoints immigration judges. Officials have already started “an aggressive hiring process,” said Kathryn Mattingly, an immigration court spokeswoman. They have hired 18 judges, five more will start this fiscal year, and they plan to hire an additional 67, she said. Last fiscal year, about 100 judges were eligible to retire, but only 13 did, she said.

Working conditions for judges grow progressively worse each year, Klein said, and that could lead to more retirements.

Though other kinds of judges usually handle 500 cases a year, immigration judges typically handle more than 1,400, and some juggle more than 3,000, according to the Immigration Policy Center.

Immigration judges face a backlog of more than 450,000 cases that has more than doubled during the last decade, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. During that time, the number of judges increased about 20% and the average wait time increased 65%. The longest average wait this year: Denver, 877 days.

“Clerks can't keep up with this workload, and it's just unreasonable,” Klein said. “The agency has expanded the number of judicial law clerks so the judges are able to do research for cases and have law clerks draft decisions for them. But we've had hiring freezes for years.”

Adding to the strain, newly arrived immigrant children and families have been fast-tracked in “rocket dockets,” delaying other cases until 2019.

“Why immigration judges get burned out is they have a high volume of cases, some on their dockets for years, and then those cases get pushed out because somebody in Washington says these other cases matter more,” Klein said. “When I started, the longest you would put a case out for was six months.… If you have to put a case out more than a year, you lose the ability to retain that sense of what the case is all about.”

Even fast-tracked cases often get delayed as immigrants try to navigate a legal system in which, unlike criminal court, they are not entitled to public defenders.

“We have a judge in Chicago who is handling thousands of these cases. Frequently they don't show up at their hearings, but we don't know why — maybe the person who is supposedly their guardian doesn't know. So those cases can't move forward,” Klein said.

It's frustrating to watch the delays benefit those without legitimate reason to stay legally, Klein said, while “people who are eligible, they get stuck in limbo.”

The cases are also emotionally taxing, she said.

“You hear these devastating stories of people who maybe have been tortured or fled severe conditions: political-related violence, gang violence. You have to listen intently and see, is this person telling the truth? It's very draining. A lot of judges have sort of post-traumatic stress.”

Immigration judges suffer burnout rates higher than prison wardens and doctors, according to a 2007 survey of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges by psychiatrists at UC San Francisco.

Judges said they had little time to think, let alone research complex cases. One immigration judge wrote in the survey, “I am OUTRAGED by the fact that Department of Homeland Security asylum officers receive more time to keep current on country conditions and changes in the law than we do.... The law has gotten exponentially more complex while the time pressures and resources (like law clerks) inversely diminished.”

Judges reported that they faced chronic shortages of staff, office space and technology.

“I have been in government service for decades, including combat duty, and I have never detested a working environment more than I do in this capacity,” one judge told the researchers.

The courts have tried short-term fixes: adding temporary judges, temporarily assigning judges to higher-volume areas, or having them hear cases via video.

But Klein said video hearings can be even more frustrating, limiting judges’ ability to interact with and gauge the veracity of immigrants and witnesses.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the judges association, called overwork and understaffing “chronic.” Marks, who is based in San Francisco, knows numerous judges like Klein who have retired or are considering it at the peak of their careers because of worsening conditions.

Marks said the Justice Department has started to address the problem, but “we're a long way from where we need to be” and it needs to hire at least 100 more judges “immediately.”

Last week, she attended a national immigration judges’ training conference in Crystal City, Va., the first in five years because of funding.

“Morale is improved,” she said, but “we are still treading water in a rip current. The longer we do that, the more fatigued and stressed people get.”

Klein knows some people applying to become judges, considers them well-qualified and hopes they can improve the system.

“It will always be a very difficult job, but also very rewarding,” she said.

Klein has returned to private practice, representing immigrants. Next month, she plans to travel to the detention center in Dilley, Texas, to volunteer representing migrant families.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...818-story.html

“I just really didn't like telling these young kids they had to go back to this situation. It really was very stressful for me and distressing,” she said. “I started out my career representing people with asylum claims, and a lot of those were Central American. I didn't want to sign my name on something and send someone back somewhere where they could potentially lose their life.”

Oh this absolutely ridiculous. Grow a spine. You're there to worry about American Kids, kids whose parents can't find a job, kids who live in poverty amidst dire consequences in dangerous neighborhoods because there are no jobs for their parents to get them out of those neighborhoods, kids who live in illegal drug and gang infested neighborhoods run by the very people you're sitting there being conned by.

They're conning you. These are people sent up here by foreign drug cartels putting on an act for you, scripted by the drug cartels and gangs behind this.

Judges said they had little time to think, let alone research complex cases. One immigration judge wrote in the survey, “I am OUTRAGED by the fact that Department of Homeland Security asylum officers receive more time to keep current on country conditions and changes in the law than we do.... The law has gotten exponentially more complex while the time pressures and resources (like law clerks) inversely diminished.”

You aren't supposed to be thinking about their wild tales, carefully prepared scripts, acting performances and con games. You're supposed to thinking about where are your parents, what country you are from so you can deny their fraud and call their government to come get them.

Central America is part of CAFTA, nations we apparently think so highly of we have "free trade" with them. Central America is not a "war torn" area. Most of the countries have lower unemployment rates than the United States. They are sources of tourism for Americans who visit these countries. There is no safety or torture issue there that is any different than what drug cartels do everywhere, here as well.

The US is not a haven for anyone simply because countries want drug money from the United Stats and are willing to do any and everything to get it. If anyone in the US government really gave a tinker's damn about these kids, they would be ending the War on Drugs, legalizing and regulating the recreational drug trade, making it a domestic US citizen run business from Top to Bottom, A to Z and shut these foreign drug cartels down. No US market for them, because we have our own legal, regulated suppliers, no money for them, because Americans will buy legal safe drugs, no need for illegal immigration to run the drugs in and haul our money out, there will be nice American store clerks and business people running the stores who are licensed and regulated, and that would be the end of all this foreign drug cartel nonsense.

There are 247 immigration judges in 58 courts nationwide, and more than half of them, 130, are eligible to retire this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

20 million or more illegal aliens in the US and we have 247 judges to issue deportation orders, most of them as simple as asking two questions and verifying the answers:

1. are you a US citizen?
2. do you have papers or documents to be here?

No citizenship, no papers, out you go. Verify with E-Verify and ICE within a few hours and that's it. They're out on the next wagon within 48 hours. No sob stories, no dreamer stories, no asylum stories, no refugee stories, no my own country stinks story, no i hate my parents story, no I want money here stories, NADA. Why? Because none of that is relevant. Court time shouldn't even be wasted listening to it. These aren't criminal trials, they're deportation hearings. It is not a "punishment" to be sent home. It's a procedure to simply return you to the jurisdiction to which you belong and remove you from ours to which you don't belong.

You don't even need individual hearings, you can have group hearings, where you simply ask the two questions to the group and ask them to raise their hands like Fox News asked Trump to raise his, if they're citizens or have papers. If they were citizens and had papers, they wouldn't already be at a deportation hearing, so when no one raises their hands, the whole group large enough to fill the very large room is deported at once.

That's why we need to enlist the support of state courts that process traffic tickets for driving without a license to handle these deportations. There should be a procedure to deputize for lack of a better word, these judges, as federal judges for deportation purposes, and let them conduct the hearings, because they know how to make a decision based on no documents. They do it for not having insurance cards, not have drivers licenses, all the same process: no docs no driving privileges, no docs no stay in the US.

This is incredibly simple stuff.

That said, we need more judges and that's why we need to engage our state court judges to assist, who are fully capable, well-trained, equally educated and licensed members of the American Bar Association, to process these deportations.