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Monday, October 09, 2006
Law - "In New York Immigration Court, Asylum Roulette"
On August 10, 2006 the ILB had a long entry headed "DOJ moves to improve immigration judges, after months of criticism," pulling together several years worth of criticism of immigration judges' decisions by judges on the 7th Circuit, along with other materials.
Yesterday the NY Times ran a front-page story by Nina Bernstein titled "In New York Immigration Court, Asylum Roulette." Here is how it starts:
Tears streaked Meizi Liu’s face in 2003 as she told an immigration judge in New York of being forcibly sterilized in China. The judge, Jeffrey S. Chase, had won awards as a human rights advocate before his appointment to the bench in 1995. But now he had 1,000 pending cases, and he had heard it all before.He insisted that she was lying, ridiculed her story and, when she would not recant, denied her petition for asylum.
The tables turned after appeals by Ms. Liu and others reached federal court this year. In scathing decisions, the court rebuked Judge Chase for “pervasive bias and hostility,” “combative and insulting language” and remarks “implying that any asylum claim based on China’s coercive family planning policies would be presumed incredible.”
It is always judgment day in the windowless courtrooms where immigrants plead to stay in the United States. But these days, as never before, the nation’s 218 immigration judges are also being judged, even as they struggle to complete 350,000 cases a year amid an immigration debate that promises to send them many more.
Appeals courts criticize some judges by name, citing abusive behavior and bad decisions. Studies highlight stark disparities in judgment, like 90 percent of asylum cases granted by one judge and 9 percent down the hall. Faced with mounting criticism, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales vowed to introduce yearly performance evaluations of the judges, who are Justice Department employees. The Harvard Law Review urged a campaign to turn the five worst judges into “media villains” to motivate reform.
Yet a more complicated picture emerges in the federal building in Lower Manhattan. There, Judge Chase, who colleagues say is chastened since being rebuked, is one of 27 immigration judges searching for ways to handle 20,000 cases a year, driven as much by scarce resources and escalating demands as by quirks of personality and power.
In asylum cases, the wrong decision can be a death sentence. In others, banishment hangs in the balance, with the prospect of families split up or swept into harm’s way. But before they can consider the merits of a case, judges must cope with an intricate web of laws, changing conditions in distant lands, and a mix of false and truthful testimony in 227 tongues vulnerable to an interpreter’s mistake as small as pronouncing “rebels” like “robbers.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 9, 2006 03:24 PM
Posted to Courts in general