\n<\/p>\n
Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of.<\/p>\n
At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts from political meddling and blazed a trail for a generation of female judges.<\/p>\n
Now retired at 71, she\u2019s seen her share of political ups and downs over her 10 years as an immigration lawyer and 35 years on the bench. But nothing could have prepared her for what she\u2019s seen the Trump administration do to the court systems she once served.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months,\u201d said Marks, reflecting on the state of her profession <\/strong>while sipping coffee near her home in Marin county, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where she spent much of her career. \u201c<\/strong>I\u2019m flat out terrified on all fronts.\u201d<\/p>\n Whip-smart, with a shock of white curls, Marks can speak more freely than a sitting immigration judge. And the picture she paints is alarming.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown has thrown the already backlogged courts into chaos. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump was sworn in, including roughly a third of the judges in San Francisco, home to one of the largest immigration courts in the country. People across the US are routinely arrested outside their court hearings by Ice agents \u201cacting like the Gestapo\u201d, Marks said.<\/p>\n She described her former colleagues as under siege. \u201cIf I were an immigration practitioner now, I\u2019d tell my clients that they have to act like they\u2019re in a war zone,\u201d she said. \u201cBe prepared for any eventuality, because it is so random and so chaotic.\u201d<\/p>\n Immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine … and what might happen to other court systems if we don\u2019t stop itDana Leigh Marks<\/p>\n Despite the grim subject matter, Marks is full of wisecracks and seems to have her spirits permanently set on high \u2013 gushing at every passing dog and baby.<\/p>\n \u201cImmigration judges do death penalty cases in a traffic court setting\u201d is among her oft-quoted zingers.<\/p>\n She describes the frenetic work of an immigration judge as like \u201cthe guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz\u201d: managing dockets, juggling courtroom tech and interpreters, typing verbatim notes while monitoring audio recording levels, then issuing immediate oral rulings with few clerks and barely any time to think. It\u2019s an already frenzied job, and one she believes the Trump administration is intentionally trying to make harder.<\/p>\n Humor aside, her message for the public is a serious one: that the Trump administration is \u201cattacking\u201d immigration courts \u201con all fronts\u201d in order to eliminate them entirely by proving they\u2019re \u201cdysfunctional\u201d. There\u2019s a backlog of 3.6m cases waiting to be adjudicated, and Marks believes the courts have been purposefully starved of resources.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine,\u201d she said, \u201cand what\u2019s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don\u2019t stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n Marks\u2019 interest in refugees and the immigrant experience comes from her own family\u2019s lucky escape to America.<\/p>\n \u201cI was raised with an awareness of immigration to begin with,\u201d said Marks. Her Jewish grandmother fled pogroms in Lithuania and was on one of the last boats to the US before the first world war <\/strong>severely restricted transatlantic migration. By the 1920s, the US enacted laws imposing strict quotas on refugees from eastern and southern Europe that almost completely shut down legal pathways for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.<\/p>\n <\/span>A protest in the San Francisco Bay Area against Ice raids in June. <\/span> Photograph: Santiago Mejia\/AP<\/p>\n Marks grew up in a diverse part of west Los Angeles, <\/strong>and spent a year in Chile after Salvador Allende\u2019s election, where she learned Spanish and saw first-hand the dissonance between US media coverage of his presidency and how Chileans talked about politics around dinner tables. She learned to read and listen to many perspectives with a critical eye and an open mind.<\/p>\n She wanted to be a social worker, but went to law school and nearly dropped out before falling in love with immigration law. \u201cYou met the world coming into your office,\u201d she said, describing her years in private practice.<\/p>\n In 1987, at the age of 32, <\/strong>she won the supreme court case known as INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, which expanded asylum eligibility by granting relief to those with a \u201cwell-founded fear\u201d of persecution. The morning after that victory, she started her training to become a judge.<\/p>\n Alongside her work in court, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges for nearly two decades and recruited half a dozen female judges to the bench. She prided herself on using compassion and humor to lower the tension in her courtroom: when people feel heard and judged fairly, they\u2019re more likely to accept your decisions, she said, even when you rule against their claim.<\/p>\n <\/span>Judge Dana Leigh Marks with Senator Dianne Feinstein and Judge Denise Slavin on a lobbying trip in 2014.<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy: Dana Leigh Marks<\/p>\n Marks retired in 2021 to become \u201cNana Dana\u201d and care for her grandchild, but she remains deeply engaged in the field, speaking at conferences, advising the National Association of Immigration Judges, educating law students, officiating weddings and serving on the advisory board of the non-profit Justice Connection.<\/p>\n What\u2019s been playing out now in courtrooms, in policy memos and on the streets has chilling echoes of the authoritarian eras her Jewish ancestors fled.<\/p>\n Among her more recent concerns is the push to recruit hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges. In late August, the Trump administration scrapped the rule requiring temporary immigration judges to have spent a decade practicing immigration law before qualifying for the bench. Days later, 600 military lawyers were cleared to fill vacant judge seats. All of this is \u201cabsolutely unprecedented\u201d, said Marks. \u201cI don\u2019t want to slam military lawyers, but there is the concern that they\u2019re being picked because there\u2019s a perception that they will just follow orders.\u201d<\/p>\n For Marks, political encroachment on immigration courts has been \u201ca slow creep that now has gone to light speed\u201d.<\/p>\n A hallmark of American democracy is the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. But this has never been so for immigration courts, which are overseen by the Department of Justice, a part of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch.<\/p>\n \u201cDeep in my bones, I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong,\u201d she said. \u201cThe boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge.\u201d<\/p>\n The court\u2019s placement has led to political interference and underfunding by both parties in power, and Marks wanted to fight back. She spent decades advocating for the nation\u2019s immigration court system to be moved out from under the political whims and meddling of the justice department and into an independent judiciary. In 2022, the congresswoman Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that would have created an independent immigration court system <\/strong>\u2013 but the bill ultimately died. Marks thinks reviving that bill should be a top priority for Democrats.<\/p>\n She believes everyone across the political spectrum should be incensed by the current level of meddling with due process: <\/strong>from firing immigration judges, to pressuring them to toss out asylum cases so they can be reassigned as emergency deportations, to turning courthouses into traps where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoop up immigrants to meet deportation quotas, and more.<\/p>\n \u201cAmericans were raised with the golden principle that everybody deserves due process, and I really think the majority of Americans believe that, and that that\u2019s what makes us exceptional in the world,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat kills me, as a lawyer, is that Trump turns everything on its head and blows through clearly established legal precedent as if it doesn\u2019t exist. Fealty to precedent is the core of our legal system.\u201d<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a silver lining for her, it\u2019s that she predicts the administration\u2019s embrace of chaos will ultimately backfire. For example, she thinks that dropping military reservists on to the bench for six-month stints is a recipe for failure. Rather than expediting the backlog of asylum cases, it will unleash chaos, \u201cscrew up the records\u201d and \u201cmake appeals go wild\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you build by chaos, even if you\u2019re right in what you construct,\u201d she quipped, \u201cit\u2019s going to crumble.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of. At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[14848,569,2301,14847,2466,2081,675,11579,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-24456","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-brutality","9":"tag-courts","10":"tag-damage","11":"tag-gestapo","12":"tag-ice","13":"tag-immigration","14":"tag-judge","15":"tag-trailblazing","16":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24456"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A critical eye and an open mind<\/h2>\n
Political interference in the court<\/h2>\n