According to reporting by The Washington Times, over the last three months of Fiscal Year 2021, immigration judges issued deportation directives in less than a third of cases they reviewed - a shocking demonstration of President Biden’s lax approach to dealing with criminal aliens in America’s immigration courts.
For comparison, in 2019 and 2020, nearly 80% of cases that went through the immigration courts ended with deportation orders or the voluntary departure of the criminal alien. Over 500,000 were caught and released by the Department of Homeland Security last fiscal year, but immigration judges only issued approximately 40,000 deportation orders.
The Times reports that officials within DHS blamed the sudden lack of enforcement within the courts on President Biden’s expansion of “prosecutorial discretion,” The Times adds that:
[C]ooperation between Homeland Security’s lawyers and the migrants has resulted in record rates of cases being dismissed or terminated, which amounts to a tacit OK for those migrants to remain illegally in the country.
The DHS source who tracked these numbers, but spoke on the condition of anonymity, stated that ‘it appeared the new team was “pushing to break the immigration court system.”’
The data states that U.S. immigration courts ended Fiscal Year 2021 with 1.4 million pending cases, yet only 115,000 cases were completed last year - the lowest number of cases in over 25 years.
A DHS official stated:
That level of dysfunction is unprecedented at any government agency and should warrant an official investigation.
Additionally, The Washington Times reports that hundreds of thousands of cases “appear to be missing” from the immigration courts’ docket. As stated above, over half a million illegal aliens were released last year, but only 250,000 new cases were added to the courts’ docket.
Simply put, as bad as the released numbers are - they do not come close to representing the true nature of this meltdown within the U.S. immigration system.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR - under Justice Department), in a statement to The Washington Times, said its records reflect the cases, known in government-speak as “Notices to Appear” or NTAs, that Homeland Security has actually filed with the courts. There are “a variety of reasons” why Homeland Security would hold on to the records, EOIR said.
Another Justice Department source added: “There’s something funny going on there but I can’t put my finger on what exactly it is.”
For more information, please visit The Washington Times.
