According to a recent report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, over 200,000 illegal immigrants have had their deportation cases dismissed because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegedly failed to file required legal documents on time.
The report, released on Wednesday and covering data up to February 2024, reveals a widespread problem where thousands of notices to appear (NTAs) were not submitted to immigration courts before the migrants’ scheduled hearings.
This failure has left the courts unable to move forward with deportation proceedings and make decisions on asylum claims.
“These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns,” the report emphasizes, calling out the “almost total lack of transparency” on the part of DHS regarding the reason behind these failures.
Notices to Appear (NTAs) are crucial documents in the immigration process, signifying the initiation of formal proceedings following the apprehension of migrants for unlawfully entering the United States.
Upon being apprehended, illegal immigrants are provided with a hearing date, often scheduled years in advance, to present their case for asylum before an immigration judge. However, the scheduling of these hearings is contingent upon the proper filing of the NTA with the court—a step that has been conspicuously overlooked in numerous instances.
A recent report highlights a significant uptick in omissions of NTA filings following Joe Biden assuming office.
In 2020, 6,482 cases were dismissed due to missing NTAs; this number escalated to 33,802 in 2021 and further skyrocketed to 79,592 in 2022. While there was a slight reduction to 68,869 dismissals in 2023 and 10,598 thus far in 2024 according to TRAC data.
In contrast to the period between 2014 and 2020 when fewer than 1% of deportation cases were dismissed due to NTA deficiencies, the initial three years under the Biden administration witnessed an alarming dismissal rate of 8.4% for this same issue as reported by The Post.
TRAC’s findings reveal that DHS rectifies the problem for only one out of every four affected migrants while nearly 2,000 cases endure a second delayed filing of NTAs.
The report pinpoints immigration courts in Houston and Miami as having particularly high dismissal rates attributable to this matter, surpassing 50% since 2021.
More from the New York Post:
TRAC suggests that the problem may lie in Border Patrol agents and other DHS personnel being given authority to schedule immigration hearings on their own.
“Ten years ago, DHS’s failure to file an NTA before the scheduled first hearing was rare,” the report said. “However, the frequency increased once Border Patrol and other DHS personnel were given access to the Immigration Court’s Interactive Scheduling System (ISS).”
“DHS’s relatively recent access to the Court’s scheduling system created a new administrative problem: DHS employees could schedule Immigration Court hearings sooner than the agency could file the NTA, and this could have negative consequences for both the Immigration Court and the immigrant respondents themselves,” TRAC found. “Indeed, this is what happened.”
“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 Syracuse University-based group notes that the DHS mishaps cause headaches for migrants with legitimate asylum claims as well.
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