The BLT: The Politics of Immigration Judges

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The Politics of Immigration Judges
Among the noteworthy tidbits Monica Goodling dropped during her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week was an internal Justice Department controversy over the appointment of immigration judges.

Legal Times takes a look at the back story behind the controversy: the development of the direct-hiring by the attorney general that allowed for political hires (which, for the record, went back to John Ashcroft's tenure) as well as the lawsuit that challenged this practice and which ultimately led to a freeze and reversal of agency policies.

more:http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2007/05/the_politics_of.html

more from the link to Legal Times article:

DOJ Made Immigration Judgeships Political

Emma Schwartz and Jason McLure

05-28-2007


Few people in El Paso know more about immigration law than Guadalupe Gonzalez, a lawyer who has prosecuted illegal immigration cases along the Texas border for nearly 25 years. In 2002, after seeing an advertisement, she applied — and was passed over — for an opening on the local bench of one of the nation’s 54 immigration courts. But when two more vacancies arose in 2004, nobody bothered to tell Gonzalez. In fact, the positions were never advertised.

Instead, the Justice Department’s leadership, which oversees the immigration courts, used a little-known power to appoint two lower-level attorneys — both of whom Gonzalez had supervised at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in El Paso — to the $115,000-a-year positions.

The authority used to bypass the competitive hiring process would be employed again and again during the last year of Attorney General John Ashcroft’s tenure and continue when Alberto Gonzales succeeded him in 2005. And according to the immigration court’s former administrator, it also allowed top political aides at Justice, including former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson and former White House liaison Monica Goodling, to fast-track candidates of their choosing — including a number of lawyers with no immigration law experience but strong ties to the Republican Party or President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.

During her day-long testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week, Goodling, under a grant of immunity, admitted that she asked inappropriate questions of many applicants for career jobs at the department and evaluated candidates based on her perception of their political loyalties. “I believe I crossed the line, but I didn’t mean to,” she testified.

Though allegations that Goodling had politicized the hiring of federal criminal prosecutors were known by the time she testified, her admission that she had taken political considerations into account in the hiring of immigration judges — who are considered civil-service employees — was not. Nor was it well-known that a discrimination suit filed by Guadalupe Gonzalez led to internal debate within the Justice Department over the appointment process and to a hiring freeze of immigration judges that began in December — a freeze that wasn’t lifted until last month. Justice’s immigration judge selection process is currently being probed by the department’s inspector general and its Office of Professional Responsibility for potential violations of federal civil service laws.