i know a lot of people at eoir. a lot of it is senior staff or eoir lifers. they have had a lot of the same leadership team for many years. they have a lot of institutional knowledge and experience we need to draw on. but it's also important to balance that with new ideas and bringing in people who are not -- have not spent their entire careers at eoir. we are balancing new ideas, new blood, with the people who actually have gone through changes in the past and gone through differences in the system. they have gone through a peoples. sort of balance their experience, their institutional knowledge, their ideas of what works and doesn't work with new ideas we want to try to work on the backlog, work on hiring and things like that is the most interesting and the most unique aspects so far. >> next, we will take questions from the audience. there have been reports of a revolt among ij's over the push for strict enforcement of faster processing under the trump administration. how are you dealing with that? >> i don't know that i would say there's a revolt. obvious

mchenry joined eoir. he served as a principal legal advisor at immigration customs and enforcement of the assistant chief counsel and senior attorney where he served as lead for national security, denaturalization in gang cases and anti-human trafficking operations and worksite enforcement matters. he also served as a special assistant united states attorney for the criminal division at the u.s. attorney's office for the northern district of georgia. from 2014 to 2016 director mchenry served as an administrative law judge in the social security administration. he returned to eoir following his pointment as alj in the office of the chief administrator office in 2016. director mchenry truly rejoined the agency at a propitious time in their history. eoir has long been a neglected and forgotten agency, you know funded throughout the government. attorney general jeff sessions announced it will be a priority that they be properly funded and properly led and director mchenry is the first fruits of that effort. s

>> this you will actually began before i came back to eoir. the attorney general in april of 2017 announced a streamlined hiring process to address this issue. and the process itself doesn't really change, but the key thing that was different is that it actually imposed deadlines. the old process had been in place since 2007 had no real deadline, so, and people moved through the process, but there wasn't necessarily a push for it. and something as simple as imposing deadlines for each of the components to review has actually had a significant impact. since that time the first ad i put out since i came back, closed in june of 2017 and we anticipated bringing on an um couple of judges from the ad itself and gets us to about ten months. we anticipate bringing on the rest in july which would be right out a beginning of july, put us at about a year. so we've been able to, so far, reduce the hiring time from 742 days to 365 or less, so it's about 50%. >> so you're telling me part of that 742 days were because files were sitting on people's desks? >>

why is this problematic to eoir? dir. mchenry: you alluded to your mission statement about deciding cases. all three of those are important. you want them to be fair in the due process. we also want them done expeditiously. they are not mutually exclusive. the longer somebody has to wait, they have to wait for years, they talked about judge candidates but in your lives on hold. somebody with a valid claim is putting their or her lives on hold until they get the actual decision. likewise, the government has an interest in the future individuals subject to removal, that those orders are entered swiftly and efficiently so they can be executed or dealt with however they need to. no party wins by delaying the cases. there's an old saying, justice delayed is justice denied. that is one of the issue. the longer the case's dragged out, resource strains, at the end of the day is simply a matter of justice. nobody wins of it takes four years to decide a case. you're in charge of 642,000 immigration or cases, lord knows how many bia

i know a lot of people at eoir. a lot of it is senior staff or eoir lifers. they have had a lot of the same leadership team for many years. they have a lot of institutional knowledge and experience we need to draw on. but it's also important to balance that with new ideas and bringing in people who are not -- have not spent their entire careers at eoir. we are balancing new ideas, new blood, with the people who actually have gone through changes in the past and gone through differences in the system. they have gone through a peoples. sort of balance their experience, their institutional knowledge, their ideas of what works and doesn't work with new ideas we want to try to work on the backlog, work on hiring and things like that is the most interesting and the most unique aspects so far. >> next, we will take questions from the audience. there have been reports of a revolt among ij's over the push for strict enforcement of faster processing under the trump administration. how are you dealing with that? >> i don't know that i would say there's a revolt. obvious

statement that reads in part, it is important to note that each asylum case is unique but that, quote, eoir takes seriously any claims of unjustified and significant anomalies in immigration judge decision making. >> if i were an immigrant, i would rather be in california than in atlanta, georgia. any day. >> reporter: retired immigration court judge paul wickham schmidt says the disparity even within regional circuits is so wide it can only be explained by personal bias creeping into judges' decisions. >> clearly the attitude of judges and how they feel about asylum law has quite a bit to do with it. >> the consequences of those decisions are gray. >> sometimes it seems like people don't care about it, you know? we are human beings. >> translator: i came to this country to get away. because i thought that here, they could do something for me. >> reporter: congress's own government accountability office twice issued reports in 2008 and 2016, both of which point out a, quote, significant variation in asylum cases. and both reports call on lawmakers to fix it. but so far, nothing has happened

which reads in part, quote, it is important to note that each asylum case is unique, but that, quote, eoir takes seriously any claims of unjustified and significant anomalies in immigration judge decision-making. >> if i were an immigrant, i'd rather be in california than in atlanta, georgia. any day. >> reporter: retired immigration judge says the disparity even between regional circuits is so wide, it can only be explained by term bias creeping into judges' decisions. >> clearly the attitudes of the judges and how they feel about asylum law has quite a bit to do with it. >> reporter: the consequences of those decisions are gray for people like muriel and maria. >> sometimes it seems like people don't care about us, you know? we are human beings. >> translator: i came to this country to get away because i thought that here they could do something for me. >> congress' own government accountability office twice issued reports, once in 2008 and once in 2016, that point out a, quote, significant variation in asylum cases, calling on u.s. lawmakers to fix it, but so far nothing has happened. n

statement which reads in part, quote, it is important to note that each case is unique but that, quote, eoir takes seriously any claims of unjustified and significant anomalies in immigration judge decision making. >> i would rather be in california than atlanta, georgia, if i was an immigrant any day. >> reporter: retired immigration judge says the disparity even within regional circuits is so wide it can only be explained by personal bias creeping in to judges' decisions. >> clearly the attitudes of the judges and how they feel about asylum law has quite a bit to do with it. >> reporter: the consequences of those decisions are gray for people like maria and muriel. >> sometimes it seems that like don't care about it. we are human beings. >> translator: i came to this country to get away because i thought that here they could do something for me. >> congress' own government accountability office issued two reports in 2008 and in 2016. that point out that, quote, significant variation in the asylum cases calling on u.s. lawmakers to fix it but so far nothing has happened. now to see all of o

or the eoir or the d.o.j. -- frederick liu: sure. stephen g. breyer: why did some group of those people stop doing what would have eliminated the problem in this case? frederick liu: simple -- stephen g. breyer: why? frederick liu: simple answer. because -- because it didn't work. stephen g. breyer: why didn't it work? frederick liu: the old -- the old system had three problems. stephen g. breyer: yeah. frederick liu: number one, it wasn't allocating workload fairly among immigration judges, which is crucial in -- in a system where i.j.'s are notoriously overburdened. number two, it wasn't capable of prioritizing cases. this is also key in an immigration system because you want to give priority to aliens who are detained as opposed, for example, to aliens who are not. and third, the old system was limited access. really, the only people who had access to it were what we called legacy i.n.s. officials, people who had access to the account because they happened to work for the i.n.s. before congress changed the structure. stephen g. breyer: as to