A federal appeals court is pressuring the U.S. Attorney General to implement a new Obama administration initiative to prioritize immigration cases that pose security risks.

On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued orders in five deportation cases, giving the U.S. Attorney General until March 19 to let the court know whether those cases are low-priority cases that the government will place on the backburner.

The unusual order is seeking to speed up an Immigration and Customs Enforcement strategy, announced last June, to help immigration courts struggling with a backlog of some 300,000 deportation cases.

At the time, the agency offered to halt the deportations of people with no criminal backgrounds who had strong family ties to the United States. It said it would place those cases on a so-called administrative hold to allow prosecutors to target more serious offenders.

But the rollout of the nationwide review has been slow and piecemeal, and the 9th Circuit chose to use the five cases in front of it to create a more unified approach.

All five cases appear to be strong candidates for administrative amnesty. The immigrants involved have been in the country for an extended period with no criminal convictions. Some have U.S.-citizen children. David Aranda Rodriguez, for example, has U.S.-citizen daughters, one who suffers from asthma, the court wrote.

There is one three-judge panel that is considering all five of the immigration appeals. Two judges on the panel, William Canby and Raymond Fisher, signed onto the orders, giving the government just over a month to decide the fate of the seven immigrants.

"I was surprised. I had not seen an order like that before," said Bernadette Connolly, the immigration lawyer for Aranda Rodriguez. She did not request the order and had not even asked the government to review Aranda Rodriguez's case under the government's new policy, she said.

The third member of the panel, Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, criticized his colleagues for encroaching on the government's authority, calling the ruling "audacious." The decision whether or not to prosecute a case is not one for the court, O'Scannlain wrote in his dissent.

"We have only the slimmest authority even to review the exercise of prosecutorial discretion; we certainly lack authority to demand a preemptive peek into whether and when (and no doubt, before long, why) the executive branch will exercise such discretion," O'Scannlain wrote.

ICE responded in an email that it was working with the Department of Justice to draft a response to the orders, which it will file with the court.

Laura Lichter, a Denver-based immigration attorney and member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, described the 9th Circuit orders as an attempt to prod the government into reviewing cases at all levels -- from immigration court to the Board of Immigration Appeals and up to the circuit court level.

"If the point of the review is to conserve resources, then that should apply at all stages of the process," she said.

Just a week ago, on Jan. 31, the Board of Immigration appeals ruled in Matter of Avetisyan that immigration judges have their own authority to place a case on administrative hold -- over the objections of either party.

While judges appear to be taking deportation matters into their own hands, encouraging government to be lenient with good candidates, it's a mixed blessing, according to Lichter. Her clients with the strongest cases, instead of going before the judge and taking a risk to obtain a green card, opt for the administrative hold where they remain in limbo indefinitely, she said.

(Reporting By Terry Baynes)

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