The immigration court backlog could be reduced. What would help, write GianCarlo Canaparo and Cully Stimson, is giving immigration courts the power to dismiss for failure to state a claim and issue a judgment based on the pleadings:
There are only about 430 immigration judges in the country who manage more than 1 million cases. By comparison, there are 586 full-time U.S. district judges (along with about 400 semi-retired judges who can maintain as large or small a caseload as they like) who manage about 450,000 federal cases.
Put another way, the average immigration judge has about 2,300 cases, while the average district court judge (who also benefits from a staff of several law clerks and the support of magistrate judges) has about 450 cases. […]
But immigration judges have no power to eliminate meritless cases early on in the process. They have no choice but to hear facially meritless cases from beginning to end.
Federal district court judges, by contrast, are able to weed out 82% of cases before they go to trial. […]
Every state and federal trial judge can dismiss claims that are legally baseless or poorly pleaded. In federal court, motions to dismiss baseless claims are commonly called “12(b)(6) motions” after the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure that authorizes them.
That rule allows a judge to look at a pleading, assume all the facts it alleges are true, and then determine whether those facts, if proven, would support the relief sought. If they wouldn’t, the judge kicks the case out.
Similarly, every federal court and all but three of the states’ courts have the ability to enter judgment on the pleadings. Similar to 12(b)(6) motions, a motion for judgment on the pleadings lets a judge enter judgment without fact discovery or trial when the facts are not in dispute. That saves a tremendous amount of time.
Immigration judges cannot do either of these things. No wonder they have such an enormous backlog.
[GianCarlo Canaparo and Cully Stimson, “Give Immigration Courts These 2 Tools to Reduce the Backlog,” The Daily Signal, September 25]
