The Sacramento Bee recently ran an investigative article that demonstrates that Federal circuit courts are being overloaded with a 600 percent increase in deportation and asylum appeals. The backlog is due to changes in the way the US Department of Justice is handling immigration cases.  According to the article, most of those appeals are being filed in the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals which has jurisdiction in the immigrant prevalent states of Arizona and California.

The Bee attributes the large amount of appeals to a policy change two years ago at the Board of Immigration Appeals.  Because of a 56,000 case backlog, the department began streamlining most BIA proceedings.  The BIA’s membership was reduced from 23 judges to 11.  Since September 2002, almost every appeal has been reviewed and denied within 90 days, according to the Bee, by only one BIA judge.  This streamlining has all but eliminated the backlog.

However, the Bee suggests that rejection rates have drastically increased from 75 percent before the change to 90 percent after.  The article states that the latest figures, for the 12 months ending March 31, 2004, suggest that almost two-thirds of immigrants lost appeals outright at the 9^th circuit or had them dismissed for procedural reasons.

In response to the article, a representative of the Executive Office of Immigration Review e-mailed the City Editor of The Sacramento Bee and stated that the article failed to accurately describe the results of the streamlining initiative.  EOIR pointed out that the regulation expanded the existing streamlined procedures to resolve more cases with single board members.  EOIR also pointed out that although the number of appeals from Board decisions has increased dramatically, less than 10 percent of that rise is due to the increased number of the Board’s adjudications, and the rest is due to the rate of appeal, which has jumped from 5 percent to almost 25 percent.

The response to the Bee’s article stated that it was unfair of the paper to imply that summary affirmances, or affirmances without opinion (AWO), are the cause of the increase in the rate of appeal since most aliens are seeking review of non-AWO decisions.  Additionally, the e-mail stated that there is no evidence that the Federal courts’ reversal/remand rates of BIA decisions have changed significantly since the new procedures were instituted.  The EOIR stated that this is an indication that the quality of the BIA’s jurisprudence has remained consistent and unaffected by the use of AWOs and single Board Member review.