I wanted to take note of an excellent primer on what an immigration judge does, written by a well-informed source. Here’s a snippet;
Before repatriating aliens with deportation orders, the Department of Homeland Security must obtain removal orders from a tiny pool of approved immigration judges. This lack of decision makers has caused adjudications to slow to a crawl in recent years.
In the meantime, aliens establish what are known as “equities,” meaning jobs, homes, and families, that make deportations more difficult. President Trump’s return to office, however, has allowed our nation’s immigration judges to do something they haven’t accomplished since 2008: decrease the backlog by closing cases faster than new ones are added.
This is a subject I know well, having served as an immigration judge between 2006 and 2015. Here’s how it happened, and what it means going forward.
If this is a subject that interests you, I recommend it.
It does point out a number of defects in present immigration law. The Immigration and Naturalization Act was written before the Department of Homeland Security existed and long before the Digital Revolution had really taken hold. As I’ve pointed out in the past the federal government is mired in the 1950s and has so many moving parts any major structural change (like creating the DHS) is bound to produce overlapping and conflicting roles and processes.
