November 16, 2005
Associated Press
JOE DANBORN

A new immigration court in Ohio next year will eliminate most videoconference hearings in which the judge, the lawyers and the person whose residency is at stake are in four places.

Attorneys in deportation cases pushed to end the videoconference hearings because they couldn't talk privately with their clients and evidence sometimes couldn't be seen clearly on a TV screen.

"It's not a very good way to decide cases that are going to affect people's lives," David Leopold, a national officer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said Tuesday.

The Department of Justice plans to open a court by next summer in an undetermined city to tackle Ohio's roughly 3,000 pending immigration cases. Of the 27 states without an immigration court, Ohio's backlog is by far the heaviest.

Judges at the immigration court in Arlington, Va., have handled Ohio's deportation docket by videoconference since 2003. Before then, judges from other states visited courts in Cleveland and Cincinnati once or twice a month to hear Ohio cases.

Officials haven't determined where the Ohio court will be based or how many judges it will have, said Greg Gagne, a spokesman for the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which administers the courts. A decision is expected early next year.

A single-judge immigration court that opened in Salt Lake City earlier this year cost $900,000 to start up, including annual costs of $625,000, Gagne said.

Video conferencing equipment for immigration hearings had been installed at 118 sites nationwide as of last fall. Administrators say the method speeds up dockets by eliminating travel time for judges, and eases security concerns because illegal immigrants convicted of crimes don't have to leave jail for deportation proceedings.

"Judges have the discretion to say if it's getting in the way of conducting a fair hearing, to set a hearing in person. But in the vast majority of cases, it doesn't become much of an issue," Gagne said.

In August, two advocacy groups called for a moratorium on videoconference hearings in deportation cases after studying Chicago's immigration court during the summer and fall of 2004.

Judges had difficulty seeing evidence clearly, according to the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and the Chicago chapter of the Washington-based Appleseed Fund for Justice.


 Language barriers and the remote setup made it hard for immigrants to consult their attorneys, when they had them courts do not appoint lawyers for deportation cases.

"Compounding these errors, the immigrants whom we observed had little chance to speak or ask questions, were unable to communicate with their attorneys (if they were represented) and typically were informed of what had happened only at the conclusion of the hearing," the report's authors wrote.

Leopold, an immigration lawyer in Cleveland, said he has objected in every videoconference case he's had that the process violates his clients' rights, a point Gagne rejected.

"There's been a balance struck, but not to the detriment of due process," Gagne said.