The following online article takes a closer look at how the Trump administration is affecting the immigration courts. Special thanks to the University of Oxford Border Criminologies project for their work to advance awareness and research about immigrant issues. Read the entire article by clicking here.
Excerpt:
Sessions’ strategy for accomplishing anti-immigrant agenda can be summed up in a word: speed. As I mentioned above, there is an enormous backlog of cases in the immigration courts, and this backlog effects the speed at which ICE can deport immigrants from the US interior. To address this, Sessions is attempting to speed up every step of the deportation process in order to inflate deportations. Sessions is forcing immigration judges to decide cases faster by imposing performance metrics, limiting continuances, and withdrawing judges’ authority to administratively close cases. Although Sessions claims that he is not telling judges how to decide cases, rushed cases are more likely to result in deportations. He is also hiring more ICE Trial Attorneys, the attorneys who act as prosecutors in immigration courts, in order to decrease the number of cases that ICE attorneys close due to their own internal backlog.