“In essence, we are doing death penalty cases in a traffic court setting,”
immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks said.1 Why? That is the central
question that this book seeks to answer. To do so, this book asks two
related questions: Why were the immigration courts assigned to their current location in the Department of Justice in the first place? And if those
reasons are unconvincing in hindsight, are there good reasons for keeping
them there today?
There has been widespread agreement among commentators and policy makers on both sides of the aisle that the immigration court system is
broken. While most commentators have focused on troubling outcomes—
long backlogs, summary procedures, inconsistent results—the primary
focus of this book is on the structure of the immigration courts. Its premise
is that the outcomes are strongly influenced by the structure, and that the
structure is flawed from the perspective of good public administration.