Court Opinion

ID: 9496953
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:39:30.627303+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:54.260745
License: Public Domain

TERENCE T. EVANS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Although I join the majority in voting to remand these two consolidated asylum petitions for further proceedings, I write separately to express my concern, and growing unease, with what I see as a recent trend by this court to be unnecessarily critical of the work product produced by immigration judges who have the unenviable duty of adjudicating these difficult cases in the first instance.
We are seeing a growing number of appeals in asylum cases every year. Just 4 years ago, in 2000, we resolved only 10 cases (in both published opinions and unpublished orders) involving appeals from orders denying asylum. We found substantial evidence supporting the decisions of the immigration judges (technically the BIA, but we can skip that detail) in 7 of these cases. In 2003 and the first 3 months of 2004, we have resolved 51 appeals in asylum cases. With today’s consolidated cases, we will have vacated and remanded 7 of these cases in a row. The countries for which the petitioners in the 51 cases have sought asylum read like the parade of nations in the opening ceremonies for the Olympic games:
Albania Montenegro
Algeria Nigeria
Bangladesh Pakistan
Bulgaria Peru
Cameroon Poland
Columbia Romania
Eritrea Russia
Ethiopia Rwanda
India Sudan
Kazakhstan Thailand
Lebanon Uganda
Macedonia Ukraine
Mexico
Recently, in failing to find substantial evidence in the record sufficient to affirm the decisions of the immigration judges, we have made disparaging comments about the quality of their work:
• The immigration judge “took over the questioning so that in the end the judge, rather than the attorney, had elicited whatever testimony [the petitioner] was able to give.”
*561• The immigration judge “made up his mind about the ease and was subsequently unwilling to listen .... ”
• “There is a gaping hole in the reasoning of the ... immigration judge.”
• These cases show “a pattern of serious misapplications by the ... immigration judges of elementary principles of adjudication.”
• The immigration judge’s “analysis was so inadequate as to raise questions of adjudicative competence.”
• The immigration judge “ignored the evidence.”
• The immigration judge’s analysis of the evidence “was woefully inadequate.”
• The immigration judge displayed an “astounding lapse of logic.”
• The immigration judge’s opinion “is riven with errors .... ”
I wonder, after reading comments like this, if we have a fair appreciation of the work load and conditions under which immigration judges must work. For one thing, what we see is less than the tip of the iceberg of an immigration judge’s work load. In the Seventh Circuit, only 6 immigration judges hear roughly 1,000 contested asylum cases a year. That’s an average of 166 cases per judge per year. Some of these cases moot out (for instance, an applicant drops his request for asylum because he gets relief — that is, the right to stay in this country — on some other basis), and many end with a grant of relief. But we only see the cases where relief is denied which leaves, I suggest, the false impression that the immigration judges are simply denying asylum petitions willy-nilly.
Asylum cases nationally are on the rise. According to the Department of Homeland Security, 63,400 asylum cases were filed (covering 86,597 principals, spouses, and children) in 2002 — a whopping 10,522 asylum applications alone have come from petitioners wanting to get away from the People’s Republic of China. In addition to China, the 2002 asylum applications came for petitioners trying to avoid returning to 33 other Asian countries. The 2002 asylum petitioners also came from 36 European countries, 44 African countries, and 19 countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean.
Many of these applications are resolved (some are granted' — I’m told 35 percent— while others are denied) by asylum officers. Only the unresolved cases reach the hearing rooms of immigration judges. And the number, as we have seen, is staggering.
Contested asylum hearings themselves are not the sedate, high-tech proceedings one often sees in the courtroom of a United States district judge. Immigration judges have no court reporters — they record the proceedings on 30-minute cassette tapes which they themselves mark and flip over when one side of a tape is filled. Much of the testimony they hear comes through interpreters. Imagine conducting hearings involving asylum applicants from Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Yemen, and Mauritania over a 2-week period when none of the petitioners have a meaningful grasp of English.
To win a grant of asylum, a petitioner must establish that he is unable or unwilling to return to his home country because of past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 481, 112 S.Ct. 812, 117 L.Ed.2d 38 (1992). Because 100 percent of asylum petitioners want to stay in this country, but less than 100 percent are entitled to asylum, an immigration judge must be alert to the fact that some petitioners will embellish their claims to increase their chances of success. On the other hand, an immigra*562tion judge must be sensitive to the suffering and fears of petitioners who are genuinely entitled to asylum in this country. A healthy balance of sympathy and skepticism is a job requirement for a good immigration judge. Attaining that balance is what makes the job of an immigration judge, in my view, excruciatingly difficult.
All in all, considering the difficult cases they hear day in and day out, I am of the view that immigration judges do a fairly good job. Are they perfect? No. Should we expect their decisions to be airtight? No. Perfection, I think, is simply impossible given their heavy work load, lack of resources, and the complexities involved in the cases they hear. In our two cases today, the immigration judges (Cuevas in Guchshenkov and Smith in Dimitrov) give us oral opinions that when transcribed run 10 and 16 pages long, respectively. The decisions demonstrate, as far as I’m concerned, that these judges have tried to discharge their responsibilities in a fair and professional manner. This court should not be so quick to criticize their efforts.