Immigration Woes

Today's NYT features an article by Adam Liptak entitled "Courts Criticize Judges' Handling of Asylum Cases."  This article follows up on a topic covered in a post by Steve Vladeck, and looks at incidents of egregious immigration judge behavior that warranted sharp rebuke in the 3d and 9th Circuits as well.  Here's some of the key language.

Mary M. Schroeder, the chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, which hears almost half of all immigration appeals, said the current system was "woefully inadequate."  Immigration judges, she said, "are very unevenly qualified, and they work under very bad conditions." ...

In another decision, Judge Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said a decision by Nathan W. Gordon, an immigration judge, was "literally incomprehensible," "incoherent" and "indecipherable." A crucial sentence in Judge Gordon's decision, she said, "defies parsing under ordinary rules of English grammar.

Incidentally, Liptak's piece refers to a forthcoming law review article in the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, but the NYT mysteriously left out the name of the article's author.   The best part of the article is the ending, which quotes Judge Rovner's reaction to a DOJ lawyer who argued before her in the 7th Circuit:

"It is so cruel to send a lovely human being like you in here to be a messenger of such madness, such nonsense," Judge Rovner said.