The Trump administration is going to court to have immigration judges removed from their union on the grounds that they are management and management cannot be unionized.
This is sure to be a battle royal as the Union is an integral part of the Deep State that has been trying to fight Trump’s illegal alien enforcement policies, while the union has tried to derail his efforts.
Federal law defines management officials as “any individual employed by an agency in a position the duties and responsibilities of which require or authorize the individual to formulate, determine, or influence the policies of the agency.” The Department of Justice told the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) that immigration judges qualify as management officials and therefore cannot be members of a bargaining unit.
The union president is Judge Ashley Tabaddor, an Iranian American who considers herself a leader among the Iranian community. The Obama administration had at one time demanded that she recuse herself from all cases involving asylum claims for Iranians based on favoritism. She sued Eric Holder so she could continue to grant asylum to her fellow countrymen and women. She opposes speeding up the dockets for the judges and has fought against Trump’s remain in Mexico order.
“Speeding up the process really places the judge in a very untenable position of having to uphold his or her oath of office while being worried about whether they’re meeting quotas and deadlines,” Tabaddor said. Elsewhere in the interview, she criticized President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for certain asylum seekers and said the immigration courts should be removed from the Justice Department.
The union has highlighted criticism of administrative directives to the immigration courts, promoting opinion columns from a former immigration judge and actress Angelina Jolie panning the government’s “relentless attacks against immigrants and the immigration system” and calling for immigration courts to be “independent and free from external influence, so that cases can be fairly, efficiently and impartially decided under the law.”