Immigrants caught in political crossfire

President Donald Trump has made it clear, once again, that he is dissatisfied with his handpicked attorney general, Jeff Sessions. “I don’t have an attorney general. It’s very sad,” Trump told Hill.TV in an Oval Office interview last Tuesday.
But unlike previous criticisms, which mostly stemmed from Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump said: “I’m not happy at the border. I’m not happy with numerous things, not just this (Sessions’ recusal).”
We have no way of knowing how long Sessions will remain attorney general of the United States. But we do know he has been very active “at the border,” trying to streamline the adjudication of removal procedures and asylum requests in our immigration courts and expedite the backlog of nearly 700,000 cases —often at the expense of the independence of immigration judges and the due process of those seeking asylum.
On the same day Trump delivered his scathing remarks, Sessions used his authority as head of the Justice Department to further erode the powers and independence of our nation’s roughly 350 immigration judges, who, unlike state and federal criminal courts, are technically Justice employees and part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch.
That distinction allowed Sessions to deliver a decision Tuesday reversing immigration judges’ authority to dismiss or terminate cases or removal proceedings except in extremely narrow circumstances and instead “refer these cases to me.”
This move follows the attorney general’s May decision to end immigration judges’ use of “administrative closure,” commonly used before this administration’s zero-tolerance policy to postpone a court date or removal proceedings to more thoroughly address a case.
The Justice Department says these and other actions, including a streamlined hiring plan for immigration judges and annual quotas for the number of cases a judge must hear, are necessary to reduce the tremendous backlog of cases. But others see the recent Justice rulings as an attempt to turn immigration judges into little more than administrative enforcers of zero tolerance.
Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told us Sessions’ recent rulings are “going to make the backlog and dysfunction in the immigration courts worse, not better.” Judges, he says, need to have the freedom to rearrange their dockets to ensure due process and the rights of individual immigrants, asylum-seekers and their families.
Johnson says these rulings and other recent Justice Department actions “evidence a clear effort to systematically marginalize and minimize the role of judges in their own courtrooms.” This, he says, combined with the rising quota numbers and a “preference for speed,” turns the courtroom into “even more of a deportation mill than it is currently.”
While we understand the dire need for reform, we do not believe that limiting the judicial independence of our immigration courts or an arbitrary quota for the number of cases heard is the solution.
Yes, technically immigration judges are employees of the Justice Department. But stripping them of the independence they need to properly adjudicate cases that are for many asylum-seekers a matter of life and death — especially for the recent influx of Central Americans fleeing gang violence and criminal networks — transforms them from arbiters of immigrants’ rights under U.S. law to merely another branch of law enforcement.
As Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigration Justice Center, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in April, “The immigration court system’s dysfunction is largely due to its position within the Department of Justice, where it is vulnerable to the political whims of the executive.” Since taking office, she continued, “the Trump administration has explicitly attempted to subvert the mission of the immigration court system, trading the safeguarding of due process for the politics-driven pursuit of increasing deportations.”
As residents of the Lower 48’s largest border state, we understand the dysfunction of the current immigration system perhaps better than others. But that doesn’t mean we support this administration’s willingness to sacrifice due process for expediency. Sessions may not be the attorney general much longer, but we certainly hope his legacy in our state will not be summed up in five words:
Justice stops at the border.
— The Dallas Morning News