Two of the remaining nine San Francisco immigration judges will retire by the end of the year, sources close to the court confirmed, bringing the number of immigration judges in San Francisco down to just seven.
The two judges are Patrick S. O’Brien and Joseph Y. Park.
Since April, the Department of Justice has fired more than half of the bench in San Francisco’s immigration courts, 12 judges in total. The largest cut came in late November, when Judges Shuting Chen, Louis A. Gordon, Jeremiah Johnson, Amber George and Patrick Savage were all terminated on the same day.
This rash of firings has pushed the backlog of cases in San Francisco immigration courts over 120,000 — the largest in the state. Should more judges be fired or retire, former immigration judge Shira Levine said that her greatest worry is not the backlog, but that due process “will be pushed off a cliff.”
It is unclear why the two judges have chosen to retire. Former judges note mounting pressure to process cases quickly in the face of escalating aggressions from the Trump administration — pressure that former judges say is designed to erode due process for asylum-seekers on the local and nationwide levels.
“We have turned immigration judges and courts into another arm of the president and his administration,” said Levine, who was fired in September.
Under pressure from the administration, Levine said, judges face an impossible catch-22: go along with the directives of the Department of Homeland Security, or risk losing their jobs.
Current judges are aware of this reality, but unable to speak freely, she said. “Is that the type of pressure we want our judges to face?”
On a recent Tuesday, Judge Arwen Swink alluded to the climate of fear.
After denying a motion to send someone to Honduras who had never been there before, she alluded to the likelihood that the government would flag her for going against its directive.
“I’m sure that will be added onto a spreadsheet somewhere,” Swink said to the courtroom.
So far, all of the San Francisco judges fired by the Trump administration have a higher-than-average rate of granting asylum; the national average is 41 percent. Judge Louis A. Gordon had the highest rate of granting asylum: He ruled in favor of 91.2 percent of asylum-seekers in his court.
Judge Park and Judge O’Brien, who were not included in the mass firings, have granted asylum in 59.4 percent and 49.8 percent of cases, respectively.
On Thursday morning, in O’Brien’s courtroom, a federal attorney filed motions to send several asylum-seekers to Ecuador, even though none had ever been there. This summer, Ecuador struck a deal to take people who had been seeking asylum in the United States.
“If Ecuador does not accept my asylum case, what would happen to me and my daughter?” a woman asked O’Brien.
Ecuador would most likely deport the woman back to her home country — the one she was seeking asylum from, O’Brien replied
“It is a game that this president is playing with our rights,” the woman said. Her voice was clear and calm, but angry.
Another asylum seeker, who faced a motion to be sent to Honduras in November, was returning to the court to respond to the motion. This time, O’Brien granted the motion, despite arguments from the woman’s attorney that she was a victim of trafficking and would almost certainly suffer more harm in Honduras.
Honduras is not required to accept the woman’s asylum case, the attorney emphasized, which would leave her with two options: Indefinite detention, or deportation to the country from which she had fled.
O’Brien simply replied: “My hands are tied.”
Many asylum applicants travel from South America through Panama then various Central American countries and Mexico before arriving at the U.S. border. It strains credulity that they all could not have applied for asylum in any of the countries they transited through on their way here. Even the Biden Administration understood, maybe a little too late, that there was some gaming the asylum system at play here and tried to curtail it in their last year.
What strains credulity is your expertise in the matter.
More good news. These judges were granting asylum to people who don’t deserve it: the numbers show it.
Now if we could just get rid of some of the Superior Court judges who think killing an elderly Asian person should be a misdemeanor.
Which numbers exactly show that? Don’t cite something falsely.