Pending deportation cases against more than 200,000 illegal immigrants have been dismissed since 2021 because President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly failed to file the proper paperwork before scheduled court dates.
The DHS is tasked with enforcing immigration law by issuing a Notice to Appear (NTA) to all noncitizens intercepted at the border, including those seeking asylum. The NTAs assign a hearing date—often years in advance—for the individual to make their case for remaining in the country to an immigration judge. The NTA must also be filed with the court in order for the judges to establish jurisdiction to rule on asylum claims and process deportations.
However, according to new data released on Wednesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, the DHS has failed to file the court documents in more than 200,000 cases since President Biden took office. When the paperwork for these cases is not filed, asylum seekers cannot move forward with their petitions, meaning they cannot legally obtain work permits, leaving them stranded in “legal limbo.” By the same token, the court is unable to process deportation cases.
“These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns,” said the TRAC report, which includes data from as recently as February 2024.
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As the report indicates, courts in Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida have had more than half of their cases dismissed for this reason since 2021. The data also clearly shows that dismissal rates were consistently low between 2014 and 2020 (less than 1 percent on average) but skyrocketed immediately after Biden took office. In Biden’s first year, dismissal rates peaked at 10.6 percent and have steadily declined since then. However illegal border crossings have only increased during that time, meaning that the actual number of dismissals has gotten even higher in 2022 and 2023.
In terms of concrete numbers, 6,482 cases were dismissed because of unfiled NTAs in 2020, the final year of the Trump administration. In 2021, that number jumped up to 33,802, followed by 79,592 in 2022 and 68,869 in 2023.
So far in 2024, 10,598 cases have been dismissed.
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When NTAs are not filed and court dates elapse, the government can easily fix the problem by issuing new immigration cases, but TRAC’s report suggests that DHS does not bother to do so 75 percent of the time. Of the one-quarter of cases that are refiled, TRAC found evidence that 2,000 of the second NTAs were also filed late.
The report concludes that the problem may stem from Border Patrol agents and other DHS personnel being able to schedule hearing dates directly via the department’s database, which means NTAs are doled out faster than the department can file them. However, this is largely speculation on TRAC’s part given the lack of transparency from the DHS.
“No information to our knowledge has been publicly released by DHS on why and where these problems occur,” TRAC wrote. “Troubling is the almost total lack of transparency on where and why these DHS failures occurred. 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 clearinghouse also found evidence that 50,000 asylum files had disappeared without explanation, allowing the Biden administration to “falsely report that its asylum backlog had been reduced this past year when in fact it had markedly grown.”
As a result of the DHS’ failure to submit the paperwork, the backlog has brought immigration courts to a standstill as time on the docket is reserved but never used. As TRAC stated: “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.”
Connor Walcott is a staff writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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