Jeff Sessions Is Now Going After Immigrants Whose Cases Are Essentially Closed

Jeff Sessions, whose appetite for destroying the lives of immigrants will seemingly never be sated, has issued a new directive that could effectively reopen hundreds of thousands of deportation cases.

Immigration judges often use a practice called “administrative closure” to put cases on hold, which both helps to clear up their calendars and delay proceedings that could deport immigrants. But on Thursday, as the New York Times reported, Sessions used his authority as attorney general to limit this tool, writing that judges “do not have the general authority to suspend indefinitely immigration proceedings by administrative closure.”

Sessions argued that immigration judges were using this tool to put court cases “out of sight, out of mind.” According to the Times, since October 2011 to last September, judges used this tool to close 215,285 cases.

Because of the huge number and backlog, it would be difficult to reopen most of these cases. But not to worry, Sessions has a plan for that, too:

To address such a backlog, the Justice Department has enacted a plan that includes streamlining its hiring process for judges, increasingly using video teleconferencing to let judges adjudicate cases from around the country and a new electronic filing system.