The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has announced a 90-day freeze on the processing of Immigration appeals to give the Department of Justice and immigrants an opportunity to determine if the claims are worth pursuing before the Court. If the Department of Justice takes this move seriously, this could be a great opportunity for one of the nation’s most immigrantion-heavy Circuit Courts to get a reprieve. Somehow we doubt, however, that the Department of Justice is in the mood to dismiss (given that they could have dismissed these cases at any time anyway). From Thomson Reuters:
“A U.S. appeals court in New York has revised how it will handle immigration cases, an effort to move off its docket more quickly cases where deportation is unlikely. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has faced an overload of cases in which suspected illegal aliens seek to challenge deportation orders. The influential court ordered that all pending immigration cases at the 2nd Circuit be tolled for 90 days to allow the government and the person filing the appeal to decide whether the case is worth pursuing. The appeals court said its hope was that during that three-month period, the parties would reach agreement on whether a case should be resolved before the Board of Immigration Appeals or if it needed to be heard by the 2nd Circuit. The order was spurred by a policy change by U.S. immigration authorities last year that raised the threshold for which types of deportation cases should be given priority. The government has said, for example, that it wants to focus immigration enforcement on those with criminal records and leave alone law-abiding people who have spent years in the United States.”