I’m a bit curious, as a foreigner, how that works. I thought the executive was supposed to be separate from the legislative and the judiciary. Or is it different in the US?
Immigration judges are a special category in the US, they are under the DOJ instead of the judicial branch.
“Hey, quick follow-up question: Doesn’t that mean that the branch of government kicking people out of the country is, basically, having a hearing in front of itself to determine whether it’s allowed to kick them out? Isn’t that an obvious conflict of interest?”
“Hey, that’s a great question. So anyway, does anyone have another question they’d like to ask?”
Amazing. Just amazing.
They don’t need to explain, they were fired to increase the immigration problem.
Fewer judges means more delays and increases the number of immigrants who end up not being able to comply with immigration deadline requirements because they can’t get hearings.
Exactly. If they were to solve immigration (like by funding it), they couldn’t leverage their most popular talking points anymore.
On Friday, 13 judges who had yet to be sworn in and five assistant chief immigration judges were dismissed without notice, said Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents federal workers. Two other judges were fired under similar circumstances in the last week.
It was unclear whether they would be replaced. The US Department of Justice’s executive office for immigration review, which runs the courts and oversees its roughly 700 judges, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Immigration courts are backlogged with more than 3.7m cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, and it takes years to decide asylum cases. There is support across the political spectrum for more judges and support staff, though the first Trump administration also put pressure on some judges to decide cases more quickly.
The Trump administration earlier replaced five top court officials, including Mary Cheng, the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s acting director. Sirce Owen, the current leader and previously an appellate immigration judge, has issued a slew of new instructions, many reversing policies of the Biden administration.
