New court in Lumpkin for immigrant detainees

The average daily population at Stewart Detention Center rose from 10,239 to more than 15,000 between 2007 and 2009. The lockup is the only Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Georgia and is operated by Corrections Corp. of America, a private Nashville-based company.

Immigration courts nationwide are straining under a backlog of cases and staffing shortages. A typical immigration judge has a caseload of about 1,200. A federal district judge’s typical caseload is about 400, said Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. Marks, who presides over San Francisco’s immigration court, welcomed the addition of two new judges.

Immigration judges suffer “compassion fatigue” as their caseload mounts, and are susceptible to becoming hardened to the problems of people appearing in their court, Marks said.

Part of the heavy load for immigration judges comes from local-federal partnerships that train jailers to identify illegal immigrants and hand them over to federal immigration officers for possible deportation. Those partnerships, known as 287(g) for the section of law that governs them, accounted for about 12 percent of people in the custody of ICE in 2009, according to an October report on immigration detention by the Department of Homeland Security.

Four Georgia counties have formed 287(g) partnerships since 2007: Cobb, Hall, Whitfield and Gwinnett.

The increase in immigration enforcement programs like 287(g) has poured thousands more detainees into a system that is already overwhelmed. Stewart Detention Center also houses detainees who are transferred here from other states.

Detainees are increasingly being shuffled between ICE detention centers because of a lack of bed space. In the past 12 months, 1,669 people were transferred from the Stewart Detention Center to another lockup.

A report last month by the Office of Inspector General for the DHS was critical of the practice of transferring detainees. The report found that transfers make it more difficult for detainees to meet with their lawyers, locate witnesses that could help their case and arrange family visits.

Brittney Nystrom, a senior legal adviser for National Immigration Forum, hailed the opening of the new court as a positive development. She said comprehensive immigration reform is still needed.

“You can’t just have better immigration courts and hope that solves the problem,” Nystrom said. “You’re going to continue to have more and more people feeding into the system.”