For the last 37 years, Ashley and her father Khosrow, have been able to call this country their home; after fleeing from Iran as refugees. He’s a surgeon, she’s an immigration judge, and they live busy lives. 

“It’s good to be able to spend some time together, we don’t get to see each other that much,” said Ashley Tabaddor.

Ashley became an immigration judge in 2005. Since then, the backlog of cases has ballooned to more than 800,000, with another 330,000 cases set to be added to the docket at any moment. 

“The two words that we’ve used most in the last few years has been 'unprecedented' and 'surreal,'” said Ashley.

The issues that plague the court have motivated her to become a leader amongst her peers, as the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges. She spoke with us in that capacity, starting with the backlog: essentially the amount of time until a judge’s next available date to hear a case.

“I have some colleagues in New York whose next available date is in November 2022; because literary every day of their week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday is booked morning and afternoon,” said Ashley.

The Department of Justice has tried to fix the backlog by hiring more judges, there are 71 percent more immigration judges today than five years ago. 

But Ashley says, that’s only part of the issue.

“The goal has been to just grow the number of judges instead of growing the whole court. But we don’t have enough courtrooms, enough file clerks, enough judicial law clerks, and enough interpreters,” she said.

California has the biggest backlog of any state according to Syracuse University’s TRAC immigration resource. To speed up the process, the Trump administration has told judges that they must complete 700 cases a year. 

“To impose quotas and deadlines is to essentially treat judges like if we’re in some sort of factory line up, you would never introduce a personal financial interest of a judge into the case that he or she needs to make a decision on,” says Ashley.

Most of these problems, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges, stem from the court not being an independent body, and instead having to answer to the Department of Justice:

“A lot of the backlog and challenges that we see with the backlog can be traced back to the fact that the court is run by a prosecutor and the court has been used as a political messaging tool, the solution is to remove the court from the Department of Justice.”

When Ashley moved to the U.S. she fell in love with our system of checks and balances, with the constitution and the rule of law. Since then, she has set out to honor and improve it.   

“It always gives me goosebumps, when I’m able to grant someone a relief and tell them welcome to the United States it’s all worth it,” she said.