New efforts could speed up immigration procedures
The government of President Donald Trump continues concentrating its efforts in decongesting the country's immigration courts and accelerating the procedures of hundreds of thousands of immigration processes. Focused on that objective, the Executive Office for the Review of Immigration Cases (EOIR) appointed 23 new immigration judges on Friday. There are already 351 judges in 58 immigration courts in the country.
But the announcement goes further. EOIR plans to appoint 75 more judges before the end of the year, to complete a total of 426 magistrates.
"Hiring more immigration judges and reducing the time it takes to hire a judge are two key elements to reduce the number of pending cases in the immigration courts," prosecutor Jeff Sessions said in a statement sent Thursday by the Department of Justice.
According to the Department of Justice, since Donald Trump became president, 82 immigration judges have been sworn in, which represents a 30 percent increase since January 2017.
This increase is part of the commitment of prosecutor Jeff Sessions to reduce by more than half the time it took the hiring process of an immigration judge.
"Due to this effort, some of the immigration judges sworn in on Friday were hired in approximately 266 days, compared to the average of 742 days it took a year ago," the State Department said.
In its most recent report, EOIR revealed that as of March 31 of this year there were 697,777 cases stuck in immigration courts, that is 45,000 more cases compared to the same period of 2017 (652,006).
The Washington Post reported in early April that the Trump government aims to pressure immigration judges to process a minimum of 700 cases a year to obtain a "satisfactory" performance evaluation and, eventually, to increase deportations. Despite this accumulation, asylum cases are being resolved in record time, up to less than three months, something that used to take up to five years.
This is because the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) accelerated the asylum process to interview the most recent applicants as a priority, with the intention of avoiding the granting of work permits to people who do not have cases. sufficiently solid.
This measure is in addition to the Trump administration's decision not to consider victims of domestic or gang violence for the granting of the right of asylum, a decision that was strongly criticized by a group of 15 former immigration judges.
"We are deeply disappointed that our country no longer offers legal protection to women who seek refuge against terrible forms of domestic violence from which their countries of origin can not or do not want to protect them," the former judges said in a letter sent to Sessions´s prosecutor.
