Push to speed up immigration courts undercuts justice, lawyers say

EL PASO – The pressure to curb the growing backlog in immigration courts threatens the rights of detained immigrants, especially those seeking asylum, lawyers and immigration judges say. The Executive Office of Immigration Review recently established completed case quotas for immigration judges to decrease the backlog, but immigration judges say the move will increase the backlog due to potential appeals. Immigration attorneys said this is an effort to speed up the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. “Make no mistake, the outcome this administration truly desires from mandating quotas on an understaffed adjudicatory agency with a needlessly overstuffed docket is to transform it into a deportation machine,” said Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina immigration attorney who is secretary of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The move calls for immigration judges to complete at least 700 cases per year, a number that was called unreasonable by immigration judges.