The Attorney General's Judges: How the U.S. Immigration Courts Became a Deportation Tool
By Tess Hellgren, Rebecca Cassler, Gracie Willis, Jordan Cunnings, Stephen Manning, Melissa Crow, and Lindsay Jonasson
Since its creation, the contemporary immigration court system has been perpetually afflicted by dysfunction. Today, under the Trump administration, the immigration court system—a system whose important work is vital for our nation's collective prosperity—has effectively collapsed. This report explains how the collapse came to be and why the immigration court system cannot be salvaged in its current form. Decades of experience incontrovertibly demonstrate that the immigration courts have never worked and will never work to, as Chief Justice John Roberts says, “do equal right” to those who appear before them. The immigration courts will never work because the structure of the immigration system is fundamentally flawed. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the attorney general of the United States is required to craft a functioning immigration court system: a system that provides genuine case-by-case adjudications by impartial judges who apply existing law to the evidence on the record following a full and fair hearing. Yet every attorney general has failed to do so. Despite the life-or-death stakes of many immigration cases, the immigration court system that persists today is plagued by decades of neglect and official acquiescence to bias. These trends have created a system where case outcomes have less to do with the rule of law than with the luck of the draw. And under the Trump administration, the attorneys general have gone even further by seeking to actively weaponize the immigration court system against asylum seekers and immigrants of color.
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Overwhelming evidence shows that the Office of the Attorney General has long allowed immigration judges to violate noncitizens’ rights in a systemic Was the Central American Migrant Caravan created in the United States? , pervasive manner that undermines the integrity of the court system. In speaking with immigration practitioners across the country, the authors of this report have heard first-hand accounts of how the attorney general’s unitary power shapes adjudication practices that are biased, inconsistent, and driven by politics: Judges fail to apply binding legal standards, make decisions based on illegally invented rules, engage in abusive treatment of noncitizens and their counsel, and even decide cases before holding hearings
Portland, OR: Innovation Law Lab; Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2019. 40p.