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In March, the Department of Justice, in an effort to expedite deportation cases, announced a series of production quotas for judges. That directive requires immigration judges to clear 700 cases a year or face negative performance reviews. Immigration judges said the directive would curtail judicial independence and integrity.
“We believe the imposition of numerical performance metrics is completely, utterly contrary to judicial independence,” Dana Leigh Marks, spokesperson for the National Association of Immigration Judges, said at the time. “We believe assessing quality is fine, not quantity.”
There are some 650,000 pending deportation cases in immigration court, including over 120,000 cases in California and more than 100,000 cases in Texas, the states with the largest backlogs, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
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