This Immigration Judge Has a Fix for Immigration Courts
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 April 2019
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Immigration judges walk into work everyday knowing that the system they operate in is broken. It has been for decades, through multiple administrations. So what’s the fix? The answer isn’t as radical as you might think.
Guest: Judge A. Ashley Tabaddor, immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I ask you a question? What does your caseload look like right now? |
| 0:08.0 | I have about, I believe, about 2,500 cases on my docket. |
| 0:12.1 | Ashley Tabador is an immigration judge in Los Angeles. She's actually president of the union representing those judges. |
| 0:18.6 | I deal primarily with unaccompanied minors, the children under 18, |
| 0:22.4 | who are identified or apprehended at the border or shortly after sort of entering the United States, |
| 0:28.8 | and they're found at that point to be without a parent. The kids on Judge Tabador's docket, |
| 0:35.1 | they are just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people |
| 0:38.5 | waiting in immigration court limbo. And as if handling that daunting caseload wasn't enough, |
| 0:44.2 | the administration has now introduced quotas and deadlines to judges as a condition of keeping |
| 0:50.2 | their employment. So now the judges are even more stressed and anxious about wanting |
| 0:54.4 | to keep their job and worrying about are they doing enough cases fast enough. So yes, |
| 1:00.3 | the sort of the situation at this point is quite challenging. |
| 1:06.5 | Each morning, Judge Tabador gets this reminder of just how challenging this all is, |
| 1:11.8 | when she logs onto her computer and sees this dashboard. |
| 1:15.4 | The dashboard looks a little bit like a speed car odometers, where you have five or six |
| 1:20.7 | or seven odometers, and most of the odometer is red with a sliver of yellow and a small |
| 1:26.1 | sliver of green. |
| 1:32.0 | These little odometers, they're keeping track of whether or not she's hitting her numbers, |
| 1:33.4 | blowing deadlines. |
| 1:35.5 | That big slice of red? |
| 1:39.6 | It means she's failing, at least according to the Trump administration. |
| 1:50.6 | It's a constant reminder for judges, including myself, of how much the administration places emphasis on numbers, on quantity rather than quality. |
... |
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