In the latest border-related security lapse to rock the Biden administration, hundreds of thousands of deportation cases have been thrown out by immigration judges because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created after 9/11 to prevent another terrorist attack and ensure the country is safe, failed to file the required Notice to Appear (NTA) with the court. Without a proper filing from the feds, courts lack authority to hear immigration cases, which in the last few years have often involved enormous amounts of illegal aliens seeking asylum.
Since Biden became president an unprecedented 200,000 deportation cases have been discarded thanks to the DHS blunder, according to government records cited in a worrisome report issued this week by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. “These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns,” the researchers write in the report which includes records through February 2024, the latest available data. They note that DHS’s duty to file NTAs in immigration court is an essential step in the immigration enforcement process because removal cases are initiated when the agency issues an NTA to an illegal immigrant, including those seeking asylum in the U.S. “The NTA alleges that the agency has reason to believe that the individual can and should be deported, lists these reasons, and asks an Immigration Judge to issue a removal order,” the TRAC document explains.
This is critical because, while immigration judges oversee cases that do not involve deportations, removal cases still account for the overwhelming majority of their workload. In fact, TRAC found that 97% of the over one million cases initiated so far this fiscal year, which began in October 2023, involve removals. Therefore, nearly all the cases that come before the nation’s immigration courts are deportation cases that require DHS to file an NTA. Simply put, the case dies if the federal agency fails to file the critical document. “Ten years ago, DHS’s failure to file an NTA before the scheduled first hearing was rare,” the university researchers found. “However, the frequency increased once Border Patrol agents and other DHS personnel were given access to the Immigration Court’s Interactive Scheduling System (ISS).” In typical government inefficiency fashion, DHS agents schedule immigration court hearings for dates prior to the issuance of an NTA. The agency responsible for protecting the nation blocks off the overwhelmed immigration court system’s slots by scheduling hearings that legally do not exist. “With Immigration Judges staring down 3.5 million pending immigration cases, every wasted hearing is a hearing that could have moved another case forward or resolved it,” the TRAC report points out.
Immigration courts in Houston, Texas and Miami, Florida have dismissed the largest amount of migrant deportation cases over DHS’s failure to issue an NTA, with 50% or more of their cases thrown out since fiscal year 2021. During the same period TRAC researchers found that courts in El Paso, Texas and Los Angeles, California also had high rates of dismissals with rates of 30% and 26 % respectively. Some jurisdictions were not as heavily impacted, according to the government figures included in the report. For instance, immigration courts in San Francisco, California threw out 4% of cases over NTAs, Newark, New Jersey 3% and Seattle, Washington 2%. Information identifying which DHS agency issued the NTAs was not provided to the Syracuse researchers, but they suspect most were created by Border Patrol agents, which means the filing agency is U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). “Troubling is the almost total lack of transparency on where and why these DHS failures occurred,” the report states. “Equally troubling is the lack of solid information on what happened to these many immigrants when DHS never rectified its failure by reissuing and filing new NTAs to restart their Court cases.”
The report comes on the heels of two record-breaking years of illegal immigration under the Biden administration. In 2023 a ghastly 2.48 million illegal aliens entered the U.S through Mexico, surpassing what was previously a historical high of 2.38 million in 2022. The northern border is also seeing unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants with one Border Patrol sector reporting more migrants in the last few months than in the last four fiscal years combines. Last year more than 12,200 illegal immigrants were apprehended crossing into the U.S. from Canada, a stunning 241% spike from the previous year’s 3,578.
