Proposed Immigration Court Reform Could Be ‘Death Knell’

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at the Executive Office for Immigration Review in Falls Church, Va. Photo credit: Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP as reported by The Washington Post, 10/12/17.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks at the Executive Office for Immigration Review in Falls Church, Va. Photo credit: Sait Serkan Gurbuz/AP as reported by The Washington Post,
10/12/17.

Judicial independence would suffer under a plan by the Trump administration to streamline immigration hearings, according to the editorial staff at The Washington Post.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking on Nov. 17 to the Federalist Society national lawyers convention, said the Justice Department was focused on “restoring the rule of law,” particularly in the arena of immigration law enforcement.

But in an Oct. 22 editorial, “Sessions’ plan for immigration courts would undermine their integrity,” The Post warned that a proposed quota system for immigration judges could undermine judicial independence and actually slow down adjudications.

According to reporting by The Post, government documents show that the Justice Department “intends to implement numeric performance standards to evaluate Judge performance.” Such a metric would probably involve assessing judges based on how many cases they complete or how quickly they decide them — a plan that the National Association of Immigration Judges has called a “death knell for judicial independence.…”

The Post editorialized, “As part of Mr. Sessions’s push for an overhaul of the immigration system, the department also plans to begin evaluating immigration judges on the basis of how many cases they resolve. This proposal would do little to fix the United States’ backlogged immigration courts and much to undermine their integrity.”

Congress, Trump block class-action lawsuits against banks

Richard Cordray will step down as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as reported in the New York Times, 11/15/17. Photo Credit: Andrew Mangum for The New York Times.

Richard Cordray will step down as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as reported in the New York Times, 11/15/17. Photo Credit: Andrew Mangum for The New York Times.

This month, President Trump signed a bill that blocked class-action lawsuits against banks, dismantling a rule issued by an Obama-era agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 15, Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the rule’s originator, announced that he would be leaving the federal agency by the end of this month thereby “removing a major opponent to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle business regulations and unfetter Wall Street,” reports the New York Times.

With President Trump’s Nov. 1 bill signing, House Joint Resolution 111 became law, and lawsuits against banks faced a key legislative hurdle. The Senate voted Oct. 24 to kill the rule that, the L.A. Times reported, “would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration.”

The L.A. Times noted that George Slover, senior policy counsel for Consumers Union, said that the 51-50 Senate vote “means that big financial companies can lock the courthouse doors and prevent consumers who’ve been mistreated from joining together to seek the relief they deserve under the law.”

During congressional passage in October, the White House reported that “the rule would harm our community banks and credit unions by opening the door to frivolous lawsuits by special interest trial lawyers.”

Eshoo, and Issues, Crash a U.S. House ‘Platitude Party’

Sara Cocoran, Founding Publisher of the California Courts Monitor

Sara Corcoran, Founding Publisher of the California Courts Monitor

A new first responder network is facing some tough questions and a lawsuit over open records, especially from one congresswoman from California, reports Courts Monitor Publisher Sara Corcoran in a new post at The Huffington Post.

 

See the story here: Eshoo, and Issues, Crash a U.S. House ‘Platitude Party’