Posner Rips Immigration Judge

His colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed, but Judge Richard Posner found fault with every step in the process that led to a deportation order for Mohamed Bouras, an Algerian immigrant whose marriage to an American woman lasted two years. The immigration judge ruled the marriage fraudulent, but Posner found no reason to believe it didn’t simply fail like many other marriages. Bouras’s ex-wife would have been glad to testify to that effect, but the immigration judge, in a display of what Posner called “arbitrary bureaucratic power,” wouldn’t let her. Bouras’s lawyer performed miserably, according to Posner.