Attorney General Jeff Sessions Cracks The Whip On Immigration Courts
12/12/2017
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Will it be enough?  Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has made moves on the kritarchs in the immigration bureaucracy at the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration "courts."  AG Sessions sees the 600,000 plus deportation case backlog at the EOIR and wants to solve that problem by more expeditious hearings. That courts is in quotation marks because the EOIR "judges" are not real judges, nor are the "courts" they work in real courts.

The Constitution gives Congress the authority to create courts inferior to the Supreme Court and designate their jurisdiction.  However, the EOIR was wholly created by fiat in 1983 by the Attorney General, even calling them "judges" was an Executive branch decision.  However, like the current Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the EOIR and their kritarchs think they are independent actors, not subordinate employees of the DOJ.  It appears that AG Sessions is now cracking the whip over #TheResistance in the EOIR.  Whether that will work is another question.  But there is a solution.  That below.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a new memo Wednesday urging immigration courts to more quickly process cases and to start chipping away at the backlog.

In the Wednesday memo to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, Sessions said immigration courts need to commit to “the timely and efficient adjudication of immigration cases.” He also said 60 additional immigration judges would be hired in the next sixth months to help with the work.

Jeff Sessions To Immigration Courts: Work Faster, by Kelly Cohen, Washington Examiner, December 6, 2017

That is a good idea, but even the optimistic schedule is halving the case backlog by 2020, which is not saying much.
"With today’s memo, the Attorney General reaffirms his commitment to the rule of law and to the timely and proper adjudication of immigration court cases,” said EOIR Acting Director James McHenry in a statement Wednesday. “EOIR has already begun to see the effects of this commitment, and — with the same dedication from EOIR staff, attorneys, and judges — can further work toward realizing our goal of cutting the pending caseload in half by 2020.”
Sessions had some good ideas, such as ending the game of continuances that enable illegal aliens to indefinitely postpone hearings on their cases, usually with the connivance of Cult Marx kritarchs like Dana Marks.
Sessions listed five “core principles” that he said EOIR personnel should adhere to when adjudicating these cases. One of these is that “unwarranted delays and delayed decision making” do not serve “the national interest...”
AG Sessions also addressed the problem of employees who thought they were laws unto themselves and made policy, not implement policy, e.g. kritarchs.
Sessions also reminded all EOIR staff and officials that they are to apply immigration laws “as enacted, irrespective of our personal policy preferences.”
Sessions was also onto other techniques of the Treason Bar, pushing cases that had no reasonable expectation of relief in the EOIR, sometimes to exploit their clients, more often to find a sympathetic "judge" who will rule on emotion or ideology.
Another “core principle” is to promptly and lawfully resolve “meritless” cases or motions before the courts or the appeals board, as well as to follow EOIR’s “performance measures” when adjudicating cases.
And then there is fraud, something the Treason Bar denies exists.
Sessions also reminded EOIR officials that there is often fraud in the immigration court system, and that fraud can lead to “delays, inefficiencies and the improper provision of immigration benefits.” Fraud should be immediately documents and reported, Sessions wrote.
Overall, this is good in theory, and again we see that Sessions can walk the walk. (Read the full memo here.) But what will he do when he gets pushback from the kritarchs?  Will he fire Dana Marks or A. Ashley Tabaddor?  And in the end, halving the backlog by 2020 is not enough.

The real solution is fully implementing and then expanding Expedited Removal, the legal process by which illegal aliens are removed from the United States without recourse to the EOIR.  Even an optimistic view of the Sessions plan still leaves the problem in place, the EOIR itself.  Perhaps if Sessions returns the appeals system to the pre-1983 system of Special Inquiry Officers, the backlog can be significantly reduced, but that isn't likely.  But of course, the problem is that Congress must act to expand Expedited Removal.  So there is a quandary, as I don't expect Paul Ryan to help, but in exchange for a DACA amnesty, expansion of Expedited Removal is possible.  But in the meantime, perhaps Trump can order his new DHS Secretary to fully implement Expedited Removal as written now.

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