U.S. Relieves Judge of Duties in Courtroom
NINA BERNSTEIN
www.nytimes.com
Mar 15, 2007
An immigration judge in New York who has been repeatedly rebuked by federal appeals judges for his hostile questioning of asylum-seekers was relieved of courtroom duties yesterday and reassigned to a desk job, lawyers and a union official said.
The judge, Jeffrey S. Chase, has been portrayed by supporters and even by some of his critics as a scapegoat in an escalating battle between the Justice Department, which employs immigration judges, and federal circuit courts around the country.
The circuit courts have been overwhelmed with asylum appeals since the Bush administration curtailed an internal immigration appeals process, and have complained of a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions and bullying conduct by immigration judges, who are not part of the independent federal judiciary.
A spokesman for the Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny Judge Chase’s reassignment, calling it “a personnel matter” covered by privacy laws. But the spokesman, Charles S. Miller, said that 11 of the nation’s roughly 215 immigration judges had been temporarily suspended from courtroom duties since June, “based on concerns about how they were conducting immigration proceedings.” Some have since returned to the bench, he said.
Last month, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, took the unusual step of recommending that the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Justice Department internal review panel, scrutinize all Judge Chase’s decisions pending on appeal.
It was the latest sign of impatience from the appeals courts. In response to the mounting pressure, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales warned immigration judges last August that they all faced annual performance evaluations for the first time and regular oversight to detect high reversal rates, frequent complaints or unusual backlogs.
But Denise N. Slavin, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, the judges’ union, said that the plan for performance reviews was still on the drawing board, and that the number of judges who had been temporarily suspended was fewer than 5, not the 11 cited by the Justice Department. She questioned whether the larger number included judges sent for a few days of retraining or education. And she insisted that Judge Chase, who won awards as a human-rights advocate before taking the bench 12 years ago, had not been disciplined or suspended. Rather, she said, he has been reassigned to develop procedures that would allow judges to refer suspected asylum fraud for possible prosecution — one of the 22 improvement measures that Mr. Gonzales announced in August.
“I think the reason the attorney general proposed it is to give judges an outlet so they don’t act intemperately” toward asylum applicants whom they suspect of lying, Judge Slavin said.
She called Judge Chase’s new assignment “a win-win situation for everyone involved.” But she added that the underlying problem was too few judges being pressed to handle more than 350,000 cases a year.
Under Justice Department rules, Judge Chase is not allowed to speak to the news media. But an immigration lawyer close to him, Peter Lobel, said the judge seemed almost relieved to be off the bench yesterday.
