Courts

Quota System Will Tell Us If Immigration Judges Are Ready To Fight For The Rule Of Law

Welcome to the Resistance, immigration judges, unless you are cowards.

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(Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As many know, immigration judges have been put on a quota system by the Department of Justice. For people too lazy to watch John Oliver, immigration judges are not independent, they work for the DOJ. Confederate Attorney General Jeff Sessions has just put those judges on a quota system for performance evaluations. Judges must clear 700 cases a year, and have fewer than 15% of their cases sent to the Board of Immigration Appeals or a federal appellate court.

Placing the adjudication of immigration claims from desperate people on a quota system is clearly wrong. Tying judicial performance to the speed of case clearance is clearly wrong and mocks the very concept of justice. The Sessions DOJ is aggressively moving to strip away minimum jurisprudential protections from people who asking for rights or asylum in this country.

I’ve written before that Sessions’s treatment of asylum seekers is one of the most truly evil parts of this regime. The very least we could do would be to give these people a careful review of their claims. The quota system makes that functionally impossible.

Unless judges resist. Disobey. IGNORE their evil boss and do what they know to be right.

At some point, good people are going to have to stand up to Trump forces with more than tweets and speeches. The National Association of Immigration Judges called the quotas “an egregious example of the conflict of interests of having the immigration court in a law enforcement agency.” Folks, that’s insufficient. Bitching and moaning is insufficient.

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Jeff Sessions is asking these people to do something wrong, and they should NOT DO IT. The immigration judges can’t even fall back on “just following orders,” because Sessions can’t actually order them to do this. Remember, this is all couched as tying the judges’ “performance review” to this kind of slipshod administration of justice. They’ll be rated poorly if they clear less than the quota.

If it were me, I’d take the “F.” Hell, an “F” from Jeff Sessions will be viewed as a BADGE OF HONOR if the wheel ever comes back around. I’d make Jeff Sessions fire me for refusing to let him destroy my judicial independence. Sometimes, the only morally defensible course is to get yourself fired.

One of these days, this current cabal of bigots will no longer be in charge. And there will be an accounting. There will be a reckoning of the people who slavishly helped this administration in furtherance of their own careers by those who nobly stood opposed. The judges who cleared their 700 cases, the ones who sent countless asylum seekers back to their countries to die, may come to rue their “satisfactory” Sessions-era performance review.

It’s time for immigration judges to load up their Indeed profiles, and then go back to the methodical review of their cases, regardless of what the anti-immigration elf on the shelf thinks about their efficiency.

AND LET THAT BE THEIR LEGACY.

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New Quotas for Immigration Judges as Trump Administration Seeks Faster Deportations [Wall Street Journal]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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