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| Courtesy Judge Honeyman |
Immigration Judge Charles Honeyman was nearing retirement, but he vowed not to leave while Donald Trump was president and risk being replaced by an ideologue with an anti-immigration agenda.
He pushed back against the administration the best he could. He continued to grant asylum to victims of domestic violence even after the Justice Department said that was not a valid reason to. And he tried to ignore demands to speed through cases without giving them the consideration he believed the law required.
But as the pressure from Washington increased, Honeyman started having stomach pains and thinking, “There are a lot of cases I’m going to have to deny that I’ll feel sick over.”
This month, after 24 years on the bench, the 70-year-old judge called it quits.
Dozens of other judges concerned about their independence have done the same, according to the union that represents them and interviews with several who left.
“We’ve seen stuff which is unprecedented — people leaving the bench soon after they were appointed,” said A. Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges union. “Judges are going to other federal agencies and retiring as soon as possible. They just don’t want to deal with it. It’s become unbearable.”
Especially worrying to many is a quota system that the Trump administration imposed in 2018 requiring each judge to close at least 700 cases annually, monitoring their progress with a dashboard display installed on their computers.
Tabaddor called the system “a factory model” that puts “pressures on the judges to push the cases through.”
Jeffrey Chase, who served as an immigration judge in New York City until 2007, founded a group of former immigration judges in 2017 that has grown to 40 members.
“They say they would have gladly worked another five or 10 years, but they just reached a point under this administration where they can’t,” he said. “It used to be there were pressures, but you were an independent judge left to decide the cases.”Read the rest of the story HERE.
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1 comment:
There shouldn’t be any judicial review of immigration cases. Those stupid moderate Republicans of the past that agreed to this nonsense are a stain on our history. Trump is having to undo many decades of disgraceful govt.
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