Immigration Courts Could Lose Half Their Judges In 2014 Who Are Eligible To Retire

The Associated Press reports that the nation’s immigration courts could see a mass exodus of judges who will become eligible for retirement in 2014, raising fears that already heavy backlogs of cases could explode in the coming year. Long the forgotten branch of immigration law enforcement, judges for the Executive Office for Immigration Review are frequently overwhelmed with a formidable backlog of cases – some 350,000 cases are waiting to be adjudicated nationally – and with a greater share of the burden of legal research, as immigrants in the system aren’t guaranteed the right to a public defender and often do not have legal representation.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told the AP that she feared a surge of retirements beyond the current average of 5 percent (or 11 judges) per year. "We are the forgotten stepchild. When Congress wants to fund immigration enforcement, they forget about the court," Marks said. Immigration judges suffer high rates of burnout, with a 2008 Georgetown Immigration Law Journal article comparing it to “prison wardens and physicians in busy hospitals” due to what judges for the survey described as pressure to handle a high number of caseloads with extraordinary consequences for the lives of the people involved.

But as lawmakers have boosted funding for immigration enforcement and detention, and caseloads have risen accordingly, immigration courts have struggled to keep up. The AP reported in 2012 that from 2006 to 2010, 27 new immigration judges were hired, to make a total of 238 nationwide. Yet the number of cases completed in that time frame dropped sharply, from 324,040 to 287,207 (about 11 percent), even as the number of new cases nationwide rose from 308,652 to 325,326. Currently, their caseload can reach well into the thousands – the AP gives the example of six Houston judges who have about 6,000 cases each.

Immigration judges often lack the same resources as their peers in other types of law. Since about 60 percent of immigrants facing proceedings against them nationwide have no lawyer representing them (as federal law guarantees them no legal right to a public defender), the judges must carry out more of the legal research on the case. They also tend to split one law clerk for, on average, about 1,500 cases, where federal judges are typically afforded three for every 400.