[ilbegone]

Originally Posted by Patriotic Army Mom

We could use our expertise to take the court system over. I may have a gavel somewhere. Ha! Ha!

It may come to that.

Some of it has to do with numbers, as in some superior courts in California, the sheer amount of cases overwhelm the case load. For example, the Los Angeles County Metro traffic court on Hill Street is nine months behind on arraignment from the "due date", which I believe is normally both the arraignment and the trial date. I understand there has been a recent lay off at the court - and only something like 5% of people ticketed nationally challenge their tickets. Despite the fact that the court system is dependent on fines and assessments to survive and further considering that with the court being both judge and jury, if everyone contested their tickets it would bring the court system to it's knees. Not to mention that if the officer shows to act as witness / prosecutor he is paid at least four hours of overtime to do so. Takes all the profit out of the defacto ticket quota system built into traffic officer evaluation and promotion and officer productivity. The officer is in court on premium time rather than on patrol on straight time.

Likewise, the immigration court system isn't robust enough to handle the volume it is presented with. I don't know how the court is funded, but even the judges who are not predisposed to deny deportation are overworked as are ICE attorneys. Some of the "Latino advocate" organizations have been reported by the Spanish language media as being massively inundated with calls about how to fight deportation - I imagine that the "immigration hotline" to pro bono "abogado honesto" immigration attorneys are burning up the phones as well.

Perhaps the deportation denials are one way to reduce the caseload by pissed off judges, much as a traffic judge may rubber stamp a stack of Trial By Declaration cases as guilty without even looking at the cases, hoping that the defendant will miss the deadline for filing for Trial De Novo.

I have no idea if there is an appeals process for ICE to resort to, or if there are the resources or even the will to do so.