The Biden administration did not submit the required legal documents for a vast number of deportation cases. As a result, judges dismissed these cases.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for enforcing immigration laws. This includes issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA) to each undocumented immigrant and submitting it to the court. However, in about 200,000 instances where NTAs were given to individuals at the border, setting up a court date, DHS failed to submit the necessary paperwork to the court. This information comes from new data provided by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research organization affiliated with Syracuse University.
In immigration courts located in Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida, areas known for their high immigration activity, over half of the deportation cases have been dismissed since the fiscal year 2021 because of this issue.
TRAC expressed significant concerns about the high number of dismissals and their implications. The rate of case dismissals surged dramatically after President Joe Biden took office, increasing from 0.1% in 2017 and 1.2% in 2019 to 10.6% in 2021.
Although the percentage of dismissed cases has decreased from its peak, the actual number of dismissals in 2022 and 2023 was much higher than any previous record, coinciding with record numbers of illegal border crossings.
If a case is dismissed due to the government not filing the necessary paperwork by the court date, the government has the option to file a new case against the individual. However, TRAC’s data shows that DHS did not take action to refile cases nearly 75% of the time.
This trend has continued throughout Biden’s term. In some instances, what might seem like a clerical error is almost never corrected. For example, at the DHS office in Baltimore, efforts to deport an individual were only made a second time in 2% of cases.
TRAC pointed out that this situation leaves three-quarters of these 200,000 individuals in a state of legal uncertainty, without a clear path to seek asylum or other forms of legal relief.
TRAC has often voiced concerns about the lack of communication and the provision of inaccurate or incomplete data by immigration agencies.
There has been no public disclosure by DHS regarding the reasons or locations of these failures. The lack of transparency and concrete information about the fate of these immigrants, when DHS fails to correct its mistake by issuing and filing new NTAs, is troubling.
TRAC also reported that 50,000 asylum files vanished, allowing the Biden administration to inaccurately claim that it had reduced its asylum backlog, even though it had significantly increased.
The failure of the Biden administration to file the necessary legal documents has caused congestion in immigration courts, with reserved court time going unused.
This significant shift in immigration statistics, aligning precisely with Biden’s inauguration, challenges the president’s claim that he is unable to address illegal immigration without new legislation from Congress.