Exclusive: Rep. Mike Gallagher Introduces Bill to Empower Immigration Judges, Declares Current System a ‘Mockery’

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher introduced the Empowering Immigration Courts Act on Monday, which would grant immigration judges the authority to impose criminal fines for contempt of their court in place of the current system that allows immigrants to defy their court date.

In an exclusive statement to Breitbart News, Rep. Gallagher (R-WI) explained the absolute necessity of the bill.

“While our immigration system faces many challenges, one of the clearest and easiest-to-fix problems is the fact that immigration judges lack contempt authority,” he said. “This allows individuals going before an immigration court to defy their court date and make a mockery of the immigration court system.” 

The Empowering Immigration Courts Act, he noted, “fixes this problem by giving immigration judges the same contempt authority granted to all other federal judges so they can restore order and accountability in their courtrooms and quickly resolve their court cases.”

Despite Congress empowering the attorney general in 1996 to grant immigration judges contempt powers, successive attorneys general have not established regulations for this purpose. 

The American Bar Association highlights this as a prominent factor in the growing workload of immigration judges and the inability to hold immigrants accountable for missing court dates, or, as the Heritage Foundation put it, it makes immigration judges essentially “second-class judges.”

With the Senate and House looking to move toward some form of border security package, Rep. Gallagher is pushing the bill as an effective, common-sense way to address some of the country’s immigration problems.

Rep. Gallagher has introduced several other border security bills aimed at combating Mexican government corruption, restoring fairness to the immigration system, and clamping down on cartels. 

They include the Significant Transnational Criminal Organization Designation Act, which allows for imposing sanctions that apply to foreign terrorist organizations on transnational criminal organizations; the Illicit Arms Trafficking Security Enforcement Act, aimed at reducing arms trafficking; and the Supporting Mexico Against Corruption Act, which would combat corruption in Mexico.

The congressman’s remarks come as Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 190,000 migrants in November who crossed the southwest border between ports of entry, according to unofficial Border Patrol reports reviewed by Breitbart Texas.

RELATED: Migrant Surge in Arizona Cripples Border Patrol Resources

Randy Clark / Breitbart Texas

The November migrant apprehensions bring the total encounters for the first two months of the new fiscal year to approximately 379,000 migrants.