Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton applauded the Trump administration's call for quotas on the nation's immigration judges, saying Tuesday the current system, as it is, is not working.
"Offering up a new idea, let's try it and see if it works," Paxton told Fox News' "America's Newsroom," commenting it "doesn't seem like it is a major change" to ask the judges to add a few more cases a day to their dockets.
"You're talking about 678 on average up to 700 in the course of a year," Paxton said. "Several hundred judges, you get rid of your backlog. I like it."
The Trump administration introduced the production quotas Tuesday for immigration judges in an effort to reduce enormous court backlogs, but some have complained the quotas will mean court decisions could be unfairly rushed.
Under the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review's new rules, judges must complete 700 cases a year to earn a satisfactory grade. The standards will take effect Oct. 1, along with six other measures, indicating how much time judges should spend on different types of cases and court motions.
Paxton also commented on a massive caravan of people heading through Mexico to the border of his state, saying it is not the first time this has happened.
"Texas has dealt with this issue," he said. "We're the border state that had to deal with this when [Barack] Obama invited people and children to come to our country."
If the current caravan is as large as reports indicate and it reaches the border, it could cause a great deal of havoc, Paxton said.
"When this happened before even with less people it created havoc on the border," he said. "We had to deal with all these people and it was difficult given the number of people that came up. It will be the same this time."
In addition, there are American attorneys meeting with the immigrants while they are in Mexico to give them advice about how to seek asylum, which slows down American law enforcement, Paxton said.
"I think they are told what to say and how do you get asylum, what do you need to say," Paxton said. "They're being coached in Mexico on what to say is what, I've been told."
But that is also common and has happened in the past, he pointed out.
Paxton also praised the Trump administration for its action on immigration, saying it has been the "most effective administration that I've ever seen" on immigration.
"We have been frustrated with this issue for years in Texas and spent our own resources and have to deal with the crime issues," Paxton said. "This is the first time we've had a decrease in immigration to the levels we're seeing under the Trump administration. I'm grateful. Maybe everything doesn't work exactly like we had hoped, but at least they're trying, and I think we're making progress."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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