Central American migrants wait for food in El Paso, Texas, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process a surge of migrant families and unaccompanied minors. Earlier, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, center, announced the the Trump administration will temporarily reassign several hundred border inspectors, during a news conference at the border in El Paso. (AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio)

Immigration judges in El Paso are using court procedures that violate due process and behaving inappropriately by mocking mentally ill asylum-seekers, making sexist comments toward female applicants and calling lawyers dishonest and useless, according to a recent administrative complaint.

Now, one of the lawyers who signed the complaint said she's heard back from the office in the U.S. Department of Justice that oversees immigration proceedings and it plans to look into possible violations listed in the complaint.

“We anticipated the agency would take the allegations seriously, given the systemic patterns of abuse we listed in the complaint are so well-documented,” said Kathryn Shepherd, national advocacy counsel for the American Immigration Council, which filed the April 3 complaint with the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “I also heard this complaint will lead to the agency doing a more systematic review of the immigration court system at large.”

Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman in the DOJ's Executive Office for Immigration Review, declined to comment.

According to the complaint, between 2013 and 2017, the El Paso Service Processing Center heard 808 asylum applications but granted only 31, or 3.8 percent, the lowest rate in the nation.

Immigration Judge William L. Abbott uses standing orders that impose a page limit on asylum applications, which makes applicants exclude evidence, the complaint alleges. He allegedly requires an applicant to submit evidence for a bond request, which keeps people in detention longer. After submitting evidence prior to a hearing, asylum-seekers can't add evidence later–even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement may do so, alleged the complaint.

No one answered the phone at Abbott's office.

One standing order stops lawyers from appearing at a hearing by telephone, which critics say harms asylum-seeker's ability to hire a lawyer or get a pro bono attorney, since it's so pricey to travel to El Paso for a hearing or to hire local counsel.

Judges are basing bond decisions inappropriately on an asylum-seekers' likelihood of winning a case, rather than their danger to society and likelihood of showing up to court, said the complaint. It alleges that judges disregard evidence, have preconceptions about cases, convince asylum-seekers to drop cases, fail to provide language interpreters and more. Judge Stephen Ruhle and Abbott have stopped lawyers from direct examination of their own clients on the stand, which harms the ability to build a record for an appeal, the complaint alleges. However, judges have let the government's lawyers ask questions, it claims.

No one answered the phone at Ruhle's office.

Judges make inappropriate comments about applicants, such as calling a mentally ill respondent “crazy” and mocking him, or saying a female applicant's attractiveness caused her persecution, the complaint states. Judges have also allegedly called lawyers dishonest, lazy and useless. The judges perpetuate “a culture of fear” among lawyers who think their clients will face punishment if the lawyers complained about the judges' behavior.

The complaint asks the Executive Office for Immigration Review to address the problems by, among other things, repealing and prohibiting the problematic standing orders, and requiring El Paso immigration judges to undergo training in ethics, professionalism, implicit bias and cultural communication. The office should also investigate other immigration courts with problems similar to El Paso, it said.

“Uncorrected, these deficiencies will only fester and weaken the capacity of the courts to administer justice,” the complaint said.

Dana Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, declined comment about this specific complaint but noted that generally speaking, when complaints arise about judges' temperaments and their low asylum-grant rates, it could trace back to an underlying problem that her association has long advocated to change.

Marks said the DOJ oversees immigration courts and it takes the position that judges are attorney-employees, subject to discipline if they don't follow instructions for things such as calendaring cases. She argues judges should be independent and overseen by a neutral judicial agency.

“The fact judges are attorney-employees leaves them vulnerable,” she said. “It's difficult to know, but appears when there is a pressure to move cases through faster, many people believe it's easier to deny a case than grant a case.”

Read the whole 30-page administrative complaint here.

[falcon-embed src="embed_1"]