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November 14, 2004

GOP Judges Slam Bush on Deportations

Here is how bad the Bush administration has become on treatment of immigrants. Even GOP-appointed judges are calling administrative decisions a disgrace.

Under Ashcroft, the administrative law judge appeals panel, the Board of Immigration Appeals, was cut from 19 to 11 judges, and made to tow the adminstrative line which was to deport asylum seekers as quickly as possible.

The result has been deportation orders againsts people likely to be killed if sent back to their home country:

What was the immigration judge thinking?" an exasperated Judge Richard Posner [a Reagan appointee] asked in a Nov. 1 ruling reversing an order to send a Jewish family back to Muslim Turkmenistan.

The immigration judge had said that because only Ahmed Mamedov's father -- not his mother -- was Jewish, the discrimination against him "was not as significant as he claims."

Posner responded, "It's like saying that a Jew in Nazi Germany was OK as long as he was of German nationality."...

"As in a number of recent cases, the opinion by the immigration judge, whose denial of asylum the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed without issuing its own opinion, is unreasoned," Posner wrote in Mamedov's case.

It's a sad day when the only check on the rightwing extremism of the Bush administration are the conservatives of the Reagan era.

Posted by Nathan at November 14, 2004 09:50 AM