Судьи плачутся опять

[Лев Кобрин]

Immigration Judges Found Under Strain

The New-York Times

By JULIA PRESTON

Published: July 10, 2009

Surging caseloads and a chronic lack of resources to handle them are taking a toll on judges in the nation’s immigration courts, leaving them frustrated and demoralized, a new study has found.

Skip to next paragraphThe study, published in a Georgetown University law journal, applied a psychological scale for testing professional stress and exhaustion to 96 immigration court judges who agreed to participate, just under half of all judges hearing immigration cases. The survey found that the strain on them was similar to that on prison wardens and hospital physicians, groups shown in comparable studies to experience exceptionally high stress.

Surprising the researchers, 59 immigration judges wrote comments on the survey questionnaire elaborating on why they felt discouraged. In the comments, which were reported anonymously, the judges spoke of an overwhelming volume of cases with insufficient time for careful review, a shortage of law clerks and language interpreters, and failing computers and equipment for recording hearings.

“We judges have to grovel like mangy street dogs” to win exemptions from unrealistic goals to complete cases, one judge commented. Another wrote of the “drip-drip-drip of Chinese water torture” from court administrators demanding more and faster decisions. A third judge cited “the persistent lack of sufficient time to be really prepared for the cases,” while still another said simply, “There is not enough time to think.”

Unlike federal courts generally, immigration courts are not part of the judicial branch but are run by an agency of the Justice Department, the Executive Office for Immigration Review. In 2006, Alberto R. Gonzales, then attorney general, reported serious problems with overload and flawed rulings in the immigration courts. He outlined 22 measures the department should take to improve the courts, including hiring more immigration judges.

The department recently hired four new judges and announced plans to hire a total of 28 this year. But a report this month by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University that analyzes government data, found that the department had failed to meet its most important goals for training judges and giving them more assistance.

Many of the cases immigration judges hear are from people seeking asylum in the United States, claiming they would face life-threatening persecution if they returned home.

But the troubling, complex facts of the asylum cases do not affect the judges as much as the pressure to dispatch them quickly, said Dr. Stuart L. Lustig, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study, published in The Georgetown Immigration Law Journal.

One judge said, “This job is supposed to be about doing justice, but the conditions under which we work make it more and more challenging to ensure that justice is done.”

Bernard Wolfsdorf, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the immigration bar, said: “If you go into these courts and see the workload, you ask, Is this a real American court? It appears that this broken system is wearing down many of the good judges.”