American poet Emma Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" and the words appear on the Statue of Liberty. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door." However, the reality is often something quite different in our nation’s immigration courts.

Issues dealing with asylum requests, deportation and immigration are largely processed by some two hundred plus judges of the immigration court. The court is actually a wing of the Justice Department and over the last ten years the judges have handled up to 35,000 cases each year. The judge is charged with listening to the testimony and examining the evidence in making a decision. Unlike federal judges, appointed for life, immigration judges are part of the Justice Department career civil service. There is an application process, but the Attorney General can and often does pre empt the process making appoints for open immigration judge positions of his choice. The result is the court is largely a political appointment system, especially under the Bush Administration. The salary runs $109,000 to $149,000 and the position can be a reward for party loyalty or political favor owed. The selection process is not subject to any real independent review nor is the performance of the judge. who is only accountable to the Attorney General. Not only that, the Attorney General is himself a political appointee of the President, so politics play a major role in the process. The judges act without public scrutiny and bullies as well as bigots can act out without much concern of real consequences for their actions, unless the Attorney General steps in.

Over the past few years, with the increase of asylum requests, there has been increasing criticisms of Immigration judges for their conduct and incompetence. One judge, at a deportation hearings in NY, regularly made offensive remarks such as "Mexican’s are drunks; Poles drink too much; Chinese are kidnapers and Dominican women will have children with anyone." In spite of his abusive and rude coneduct, it took more then seven years for him to lose his job. A federal appeals court said about a Philadelphia immigration judge: "Yet once again, under the bullying nature of the immigration judge’s questioning, a petitioner was ground to bits." in a Boston immigrtion court proceedings involving a Ugandan woman named Jane, the judge mockingly referred to himself as "Tarzan." On the other side of the country, the 9^th Circuit held an immigration judge’s decision "was literally incomprehensible." These are only a few examples of all too frequent cases of rude, biased and incompetent behavior according to the media and appellate courts.

Another local example involved Immigration judge Anna Ho, who served in Seattle until her transfer to San Francisco. She obtained her law degree from the University of West Los Angeles School of law in 1976 and was in private practice until her appointment in 1995. As one of three immigration judges in Seattle she heard cases without a jury. She and her fellow judges examine and cross examine witnesses and make the final decision. Decisions are subject to appellate review, but most cases end with the ruling of the Immigration judge. The Seattle P.I. reported that directing attorney for the Washington Defender Association’s Immigration Project said of Judge Ho that her "behavior in the courtroom was often extremely random and unpredictable – sometimes she would be polite and respectful of immigrants appearing before her; other times she would berate them, subject them to harsh, unnecessary questioning and fly out of the courtroom enraged." In deportation case, she rejected overwhelming evidence, including a birth certificate, report cards, year book and tax records of Salvador Rivera proving he had been born and schooled in Portland. Instead she ruled he should be deported as a foreign born to Mexico. On appeal the 9^th Circuit reversed and noted Ho had failed to conduct herself as an impartial judge, but rather acted as a prosecutor anxious to pick holes in the petitioner’s story." There were other examples of verbal abuse and strange rulings which finally resulted, not in her termination, but her transfer. Attorney General Gonzales now says he will purge the judges doing a bad job. It will be of great import to people appearing in these courts whether he lives up to his word or not.