Excerpt from CNN:
Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a ruling Thursday restoring discretion to immigration judges by allowing them to administratively close cases, a move that could prove significant in chipping away at the more than million case backlog facing immigration courts.Thursday’s ruling would allow immigration judges to put cases on hold or remove them from the active docket, if appropriate — an authority that was stripped during the Trump administration to the frustration of some judges. The US immigration court system falls under the Justice Department.”It’s a very practical tool that judges need to control their dockets,” said Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president emerita at the National Association of Immigration Judges, the immigration judges union.”It makes sense in immigration because of the fact that there are certain applications and benefits that people can qualify for that require a preliminary step in by either [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] or sometimes by a state court and that action may determine whether someone is eligible for a benefit before the court,” Marks said.
