The Biden administration failed to file court papers in hundreds of thousands of deportation cases, which were, as a result, tossed by judges.
The Department of Homeland Security enforces immigration laws by issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA) to each illegal immigrant and filing it in court. But in approximately 200,000 cases in which NTAs were issued to aliens at the border, triggering the creation of a court date, DHS never filed the actual paper with the court, according to new data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an academic group better known as TRAC.
In immigration courts in Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida, both immigration hotbeds, more than half of their deportation cases have been dismissed for that reason since fiscal year 2021.
“These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns,” the nonpartisan group, affiliated with Syracuse University, said in its report. The percentage of immigration cases that were dismissed skyrocketed immediately upon President Joe Biden taking office, rising from 0.1% in 2017 and 1.2% in 2019 to 10.6% in 2021.
via joemiller