Nicholas Nehamas

But we did find one judge who, because of her unique situation, was able to speak with us on the record and put her experiences out there.

Hi, Holly.

Nice to see you again.

She is Judge Holly DeAndre, and she hears cases at an immigration court in Texas.

She is also the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, which is a labor union that represents these judges, and she was able to speak to us in that capacity.

We did.

So she has a really interesting perspective on all this, which started long before she became an immigration judge.

She becomes a federal prosecutor on the southwest border and really sees the ugly side of immigration.

And she is working on the border during the Obama years when thousands of unaccompanied children were showing up and turning themselves over to border patrols.

And she's seeing people both exploit the system and be exploited by it.

So basically, she decides that prosecuting cases isn't enough.

that she wants to be the one who makes the final decision about who gets to stay and who has to leave the United States.

And she gets that chance in Trump's first term when his Justice Department sees the work she's done prosecuting cases on the border and appoints her to be an immigration judge.

So she finds a system that's facing just an extraordinary backlog of cases.

At that time, there was a huge number of migrants crossing the border and claiming asylum, so many that it really made it difficult for judges to keep up.

And on top of that, these cases are not cut and dry.

To qualify for asylum under U.S.

immigration law, you have to meet a very specific set of criteria.

And while some of the people coming before these judges meet that criteria, most do not.

Many people are coming for economic opportunity, but they're claiming asylum because that's pretty much their best shot at getting to stay in the U.S.