Alberto Gonzales Testifies Before Senate Judiciary Committee
See Download gonzales_testimony_72407.pdf for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s written statement for his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 24. Dan Kowalski of Bender’s Immigration Bulletin – Daily Edition http://www.bibdaily.com identifies places where immigration and the Executive Office for Immigration Review are discussed (pp. 20-24).
Highlights:
Page 20: “Nearly one third of the 60,000 new criminal cases filed last year were for immigration offenses.”
Page 21: “[O]ur border districts prosecute tens of thousands of misdemeanor cases for entering without inspection in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1325 that are not included in our case filing statistics.”
Page 22: “[T]he initial vetting, evaluation, and interviewing functions [for new Immigration Judges] have been placed within the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge and within the Executive Office for Immigration Review as a whole. In addition, EOIR has developed extensive training programs for both new appointees and veteran immigration judges, has noticeably improved its transcription services, and has placed supervisory immigration judges in the field to provide improved and more consistent management of the immigration courts. EOIR is also set to issue procedural manuals and other resource materials for use both by the immigration judges and by those who appear before them in immigration courts, and EOIR is about to begin replacing the immigration courts’ antiquated audio recording system with greatly improved digital systems. Identifying problems as they arise is essential to ensuring quality, and thus EOIR has established channels through which private individuals and government attorneys now can report their concerns about the conduct, professionalism, or quality of decisions of immigration judges. In order to avoid the occurrence of such problems, the Department is undertaking the promulgation of codes of conduct for immigration judges and Board members. The Department has already published proposed codes for review and comment. [The codes can be found at http://www.aila.org/content/default.aspx?docid=22778 — KJ]. The integrity of the immigration courts requires more than the unfailing professionalism of immigration judges; it requires the prevention of fraud and abuse as well. In pursuit of this objective, we have created a formal process by which immigration judges can refer suspected instances of immigration fraud and abuse for investigation and potential prosecution. Forty-five such cases have already been referred. The Board is contributing to the quality and consistency of immigration decisions itself by publishing more precedent decisions this year than it has over the previous six years and by drastically decreasing its reliance on summary one-line decisions. These summary decisions now account for less than 10% of the Board’s total decisions. Finally, the Committee will be pleased to learn that EOIR has greatly improved its public outreach efforts over the last year by doubling the size of the Legal Orientation Program for unrepresented detained aliens, expanding pro bono programs for unaccompanied alien children, and increasing the number of court-sponsored pro bono attorney training programs.”
The draft code of conduct is on the AILA website (here), although it doesn’t say anything about procedures for reporting violations of the code.
KJ