Per this post at the Legal Ethics Forum:
Judge Posner recently issued a scathing critique of the immigration court system. He criticized the competence of immigration judges and lamented the dearth of qualified lawyers to handle immigration matters.
For more on these issues, you might want to take a look at this new article by Professor Michele Benedetto on the immigration court system. It is entitled, “Crisis on the Immigration Bench: An Ethical Perspective.”
Anecdotally, my own experience in immigration court suggests that Posner has been far too kind. I represented a Liberian refugee in an asylum case. She had been raped by soldiers who broke up an anti-government rally at the university where she was a student (a well-documented incident reported by Amnesty International among others). The immigration judge discredited her testimony because, in her initial asylum interview, she had used the term “sexual harassment” to describe her experience. It was, according to this judge — a white man from Seattle — simply inconceivable that anyone — even someone who is not a native speaker of American English, from a socially conservative society, describing a painful and humiliating experience — would not have said “rape” or “sexual assault”.