September 06, 2019
The US Justice Department has gone to court to try to kill the labor union of immigration judges, which is headed by an Iranian-American woman, Afsaneh Ashley Tabaddor.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) argues that the country’s 440 immigration judges have no right to a labor union because they are managers, not workers. The union says the move is an effort to silence the union’s criticism of the way the Trump Administration handles immigration cases.
A petition filed August 16 with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) contends the union shouldn’t be allowed because the judges are management officials who help decide or shape the agency’s policies, a Department of Justice spokesman said.
In recent months, the immigration judges’ union has spoken out against performance quotas and rules for managing court dockets. The National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) has also called for the immigration courts to become independent of the Department of Justice. Immigration judges are currently employees of the Justice Department and not part of the Judicial Branch of the federal government.
“It’s absurd that anyone would consider us managers,” Tabaddor said in a statement. “We don’t even have the authority to order pencils.”
Federal law defines management officials as “any individual employed by an agency in a position the duties and responsibilities of which require or authorize the individual to formulate, determine, or influence the policies of the agency.”
Tabaddor called the move an “effort to mute” the country’s immigration judges.
Tabaddor, for example, last year criticized the admin-istration’s effort to pressure judges to process cases faster by implementing a quota system tied to their performance reviews, saying the directive “could call into question the integrity and impartiality of the court if a judge’s decision is influenced by factors outside the facts of the case.”
She called the suit against the union “a desperate attempt by the DOJ to evade transparency and accountability, and undermine the decisional independence of the nation’s 440 Immigration Judges…. We are trial court judges who make decisions on the basis of case specific facts and the nation’s immigration laws. We do not set policies, and we don’t manage staff.”
Tabaddor was born in Iran and came to the United States when she was about 10 years old. She was a federal prosecutor before becoming an immigration judge in 2005.
Immigration judges are tasked with deciding who can stay in the country legally and who should be deported. The judges decide thousands of cases each year and are currently facing a backlog of 930,000 cases.
The judges’ union said the courts need more immigration judges, not assembly-line proceedings.
This is not the first time an administration has challenged the organization, which was founded in 1971. The Clinton Administration also tried to decertify the union, a move that the Federal Labor Relations Authority rejected.
But tensions between the department and immigration judges have only escalated in recent years. The union has called on Congress to remove the immigration court system from the DOJ and establish it as an independent entity.
In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions also made it more difficult for judges to grant asylum to domestic violence victims, as well as dismiss cases, Tabaddor said last month. These changes are producing a slower system with a bigger backlog, she argued.
According to a recent analysis by The Associated Press, a large number of Trump’s appointees—190 of the 440 judges—are former military or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lawyers.
Tabaddor was in the news before, when the Justice Department barred her in 2014 from hearing cases that involved Iranian immigrants because she was active in the Iranian-American community. No other foreign-born judge received such an order. Tabaddor went to court—and won her case.