Immigration Judge Appointments Political?

Heads ought to roll in the DOJ as a result of today’s OIG Report about DOJ hiring practices. But they probably won’t. There simply is no accountability left in the Bush Administration, and once again, Congress and the Courts are likely to shrug this one off, as they have so many othr impeachable offenses revealed during the last several years.

DOJ hires are supposed to enforce federal law, so imagine what happens when DOJ hires are found breaking federal law. It goes to the DOJ.

The outcome?  Rather than be held to a higher standard, most DOJ lackeys likely will continue legal or consulting careers in the lucrative private sector. Perhaps Monica Goodling will lose her law license, but unfortunately she likely will be the only one held accuntable, and she is but the tip of this immense iceberg (larger than anything you’d see around the North Pole these days) of Bush corruption inside the DOJ.

Consider one example revealed in today’s Report.

Her cohort Kyle Sampson was behind DOJ appointment of Immigration Judges, top level civil service appointments (GS-16), who are hired to adjudicate immigrant removals and relief from deportation, not to serve the sitting president in a partisan way.

Even more lamentable is the following:   As egregious a broach of law as such appointments undoubtedly are, this isn’t the first time that immigration judges were hired for their political affiliation or policy sympathies.

Under Ed Meese, the Reagan DOJ issued the “Meese Memo” which instructed the OIJ to consider Nicaraguan applicants for political asylum to be refugees while applicants from El Salvador were considered economic migrants.  Further, it was widely believed during those years that extremely well qualified immigration lawyers democrats were being passed over for less well qualified republican sycophants.

Regrettably, the immmense amount of discretion that immigration law gives to IJs, coupled with the enormous gravitas of many asylum claims, gives many unqualified Bush appointments the sovereign powers of life and death over immigrants who have few rights to appeal adverse IJ decisions.

The issue of whether Monica Goodling loses her law license should pale before the amount of blood on the hands of the architects of this policy, both during the 1980s and now. If this is the Reagan that Bush had hoped to emulate, may the history books record that it was one of Reagan’s most shameful policy initiatives, and keep in mind, there were many.