WASHINGTON – Immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have been disproportionately rejected by judges whom the Bush administration chose using a conservative political litmus test, according to an analysis of Justice Department data.
The analysis suggests that the effects of a patronage-style selection process for immigration judges – used for three years before it was abandoned as illegal – continue to be felt by scores of immigrants whose fates are determined by the judges installed in that period.
The data focus on 16 judges who were vetted for political affiliation before being hired and have since ruled on at least 100 cases each.
A comparison of their records to others in the same cities shows that as a group, they ruled against asylum-seekers significantly more often than colleagues who were appointed, as the law requires, under politically neutral rules.
Critics of the politicization of the immigration bench say it isn't enough that the department stopped using illegal hiring procedures in 2007. They say the fact that many of the politically selected judges remain in power continues to undermine the perceived fairness of hearings for immigrants fighting deportation.
The immigration court “is now the seat of individuals who were appointed illegally, and that means that in the minds of many people, the court symbolizes illegality,” said Bruce Einhorn, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, who was an immigration judge from 1990 until he retired last year.
Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, wrote in an e-mailed response to questions, “The fact that the process was flawed does not mean that the immigration judges selected through that process are unfit to serve.”
The Bush administration has been accused by Democrats and other critics of improperly bringing politics into the business of federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Services Administration and, most notably, the Justice Department, which has been reeling under accusations that officials sought to politicize the apparatus of law enforcement.
This summer, the department's inspector general released two reports confirming that for several years, administration officials illegally took political affiliation into account when hiring recent law-school graduates, summer associates, some assistant prosecutors and immigration judges.
The report covering the selection of immigration judges primarily blamed Kyle Sampson, a former top aide to the attorney general, and two former White House liaisons to the department, Monica Goodling and Jan Williams, for the practice.
When vetting applicants, for example, Goodling asked them questions about their political beliefs and researched their campaign contributions. She also conducted Internet searches of their names and words such as “asylum,” “immigrant” and “border,” as well as partisan terms such as “abortion,” “Iraq” and “gay” and the names of political figures, to determine their views, the report said. But it presented no evidence that Goodling's efforts were connected to an official policy goal of restricting asylum. The White House has said it never ordered political hiring of civil servants.
The Justice Department employs more than 200 immigration judges in more than 50 courts around the country. They conduct hearings for noncitizens asking not to be deported, including asylum-seekers who say they fear religious or political persecution.
Although called “judges,” the hearing examiners aren't confirmed by the Senate for life. They're covered by federal civil-service laws, which stipulate that they must be hired on the basis of merit under politically neutral criteria.
But in early 2004, political appointees took control of hiring the judges away from career professionals and essentially began treating the positions – which carry salaries of $104,300 to $158,500 – as patronage jobs. They screened out liberals and Democrats while steering openings to White House-vetted “Bush loyalists” and other job-seekers vouched for by Republican political appointees.
