The figures are astounding! According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-partisan research organization from Syracuse University, the backlog of immigration cases pending before the Immigration Courts throughout the country is 44% higher than it was in 2008.
The average time these cases had been pending, TRAC said, was 467 days.
California led states with the longest wait time – 639 days, followed by Massachusetts with 615 and Nebraska with 511 days.
Among the countries with the most people involved in Immigration Court cases, people from Armenia had the longest wait – 886, nearly twice the national average of 467 days, the report said.
Other nationalities that waited the longest were Indonesians, Albanians, Iranians and Pakistanis.
This could be in part due to the delay in processing all the background checks, something over which neither the applicant nor the Department of Homeland Security have any power. But it is also a sign of the budgetary crisis faced by the federal government since, clearly, there needs to be additional Immigration Judges, court staff and Department of Homeland Security attorneys hired to deal with this mass of cases.
How many times did I show up in court, ready to present my client's case,and the case was continued, either due to lack of background check, or DHS counsel having misplaced the file, or an interpreter not being available, or the Judge simply having a boatload of cases that took priority because they were pending for even longer than my client's? And of course let's not forget the unscrupulous individuals, attorney and non-attorney alike who have abused the system so egregiously by submitting forged documents, resulting in an entire ethnic group being placed under suspicion because of the actions of a few, and therefore more delay while the government attempts to examine the validity of every documentation submitted by the applicant in their out of state forensics lab, or through certification at the American consulates abroad.
I remember around 2002 the Board of Immigration Appeals underwent major restructuring, with many of the Judges being fired, and the processing of the cases expedited due to a new one member vs three member panel decision making process. But swift justice is not always adequate justice.
What happened is that temporarily, the BIA was able to clear some backlog by basically rubber stamping denials on complex cases that demanded more analysis and these simply ended up being remanded back fromt he Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals because the decisions simply failed to articulate or demonstrate if the legal and factual factors were properly evaluated.
And that is for the people who were able to afford legal representation to take them all the way to the Ninth Circuit. For those who didn't, it simply reaffirmed in them the notion that justice is not for the poor! This was a really sad situation as we are not talking about contractual disputes between multi-million dollar companies but the life and death issues of largely indigent families with small children who had survived the most terrifying acts of physical and mental abuse in their home countries.
So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. What is the better of two awful scenarios? An extreme delay in adjudication that basically places a family's survival options in limbo for several years or the kind of swift justice that unfortunately more often than not destroys that same family's chance of survival?
You can read more about TRAC's backlog study in this article here.
No comments:
Post a Comment