Responding to pleas from immigration judges and lawyers who say the nation’s immigration courts are faltering under a crushing caseload, the American Bar Association called Monday for Congress to scrap the current system and create a new, independent court for immigration cases.

In a vote at its semiannual meeting in Orlando, Fla., the lawyers’ organization endorsed a recommendation for a separate immigration court system that would be similar to federal courts that decide tax cases.

Behind the seemingly arcane proposal was a portrait of the nation’s immigration courts besieged with new cases arising from an intensified federal crackdown on illegal immigration, and challenged by critics who doubt the courts’ impartiality. The lawyers described the courts’ condition in a report of more than 1,500 pages released last week.

The immigration courts are not courts at all in the way Americans generally think of them. They are part of the Department of Justice, not the federal judiciary, and the judges, although they wear robes and sit in formal courtrooms, are employees of the attorney general.

While Congress has debated since 2006 an overhaul of the immigration system that would include measures to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, proposals for fixing the courts have been largely ignored.

But the courts have become “an overwhelmed system choked by an exploding caseload,” said Lawrence Schneider, an immigration lawyer at Arnold & Porter in Washington and a main author of the bar association report. The report was ordered 18 months ago by the association’s immigration commission, a nonpartisan panel of lawyers who monitor immigration laws and recommend changes.

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