Immigration courts to get review

Stung by mounting criticism of the nation’s immigration courts, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday took the extraordinary step of launching a “comprehensive review” of how the immigration system is handling the pleas of hundreds of thousands of refugees and others fighting deportation each year.

In memos delivered to every immigration judge in the country, Gonzales expressed dismay at reports of poor treatment of aliens in the immigration system, citing “intemperate or even abusive conduct.” He declared that the work of the immigration courts “must improve.” The immigration courts are under the control of the attorney general and Justice Department.

Gonzales’ call for an examination of the immigration courts has been triggered by a steady barrage of criticism from immigrant rights advocates and federal judges, whose courts have been inundated with appeals from refugees and other noncitizens who insist their immigration cases are getting short shrift.

A San Jose Mercury News series last fall found noncitizens often get rapid-fire justice in the immigration courts, particularly since post-Sept. 11 reforms downsized the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is responsible for reviewing the work of the nation’s 215 immigration judges. The Board of Immigration Appeals has been deciding many cases, including life and death pleas for asylum, in perfunctory, boilerplate orders. Those decisions are being appealed – and overturned – in the federal appeals courts in unprecedented numbers, the Mercury News found.

Now, Gonzales has ordered a top-to-bottom review of the system, more than three years after former Attorney General John Ashcroft streamlined the immigration courts to push more cases through faster and clear a backlog as the agency tried to focus on keeping terrorists out of the country.

“We’ve been encouraging this sort of thing to happen,” said Mary Schroeder, the chief judge of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been hit hardest by a surge in immigration appeals. “This system needs to be improved, there is no doubt about that.”

A spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts, declined comment on the Gonzales memos. Denise Slavin, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told the Associated Press she welcomes the review.

“We think the premise of the review may be somewhat faulty, but hopefully it will allow us to get some additional resources,” Slavin said.

Gonzales did not include specifics in his memos, but most of the attention in the past year has been focused on the lax level of review in the Board of Immigration Appeals and cases where hasty or mistake-prone decisions by overworked immigration judges were allowed to slip through the cracks. Immigration judges handled more than 300,000 cases last year, including tens of thousands of cases where asylum-seekers, many fearing torture or death if returned to their homelands, rely on the immigration courts as their last hope to stay in the United States.

Since Ashcroft’s reforms were put in place, the number of immigration appeals to the federal courts has jumped from 1,760 in 2001 to nearly 11,000 last year. The 9th Circuit now hears half of all of those appeals, going from 954 immigration cases to nearly 6,000 in 2005.