Immigration judges drop 200K deportation cases after Biden’s DHS didn’t file paperwork in time: Report

Immigration judges dropped roughly 200,000 deportation cases after the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security failed to file required paperwork in time, according to a Wednesday report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

TRAC, a nonpartisan research organization, reported that the DHS did not file Notice to Appear documents with immigration courts by the time of scheduled hearings for hundreds of thousands of migrants.

“Without a proper filing, the Court lacks jurisdiction to hear the case and the immigrants, often asylum seekers, lack a way to move their case forward,” the report read. “These large numbers of dismissals and what then happens raise serious concerns.”

An NTA is issued when the DHS has reason to believe that the migrant should be deported. The documents detail why the agency believes the individuals should be removed and request that an immigration judge issue a deportation order. Nearly all immigration court cases are removal cases, which require NTA documents to be filed.

According to TRAC, the DHS’ failure to file the paperwork in time increased once other agency personnel, including Border Patrol agents, were granted the ability to access the immigration court’s Interactive Scheduling System, which allows officials to schedule initial hearings while issuing an NTA. As a result, many hearings were scheduled before the NTA documents could be filed with the courts, TRAC explained.

“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. Indeed, this is what happened,” the report read.

“DHS has been able to block off the Court’s valuable limited time by scheduling hearings for cases that do not legally exist, because DHS has not filed the required NTA before the hearing,” it continued. “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 case dismissals have also extended the time it takes migrants to obtain work permits since formal asylum petitions must first be filed.

From fiscal year 2014 to 2018, fewer than 1% of immigration cases were dismissed because NTAs were not filed in time. The percentage of dropped cases increased in the following years: 1.2% (8,192) in 2019, 3.3% (6,482) in 2020, 10.6% (33,802) in 2021, and 10% (79,592) in 2022.

“During FY 2022, monthly dismissals averaged over 6,600. Last year, during FY 2023, numbers fell slightly to an average of 5,700 each month. However, this year so far during FY 2024 monthly average dismissals have fallen to 2,100 – down 68 percent from their peak during FY 2022,” TRAC found.

It is unclear which DHS agency is responsible for creating the NTAs that were not filed in time, the report noted. However, TRAC speculated that Border Patrol agents likely created most of the documents. It also stated that immigration courts in Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida, disproportionately dealt with “problematic filings” and had 50% “or more of their cases dismissed for this reason since FY 2021.”

In most instances, after the courts have dismissed a case, the DHS must issue a new NTA, restarting the removal proceedings.

“Except for the parties involved, the public has not had a way of knowing that a new case file number was created to rectify DHS’s earlier error. This is because the case is now tracked under a brand-new file number without any reference back to the earlier case in the information the Immigration Court has previously made public,” the report added.

By obtaining court records, TRAC was able to determine that only approximately a quarter of migrants whose cases were dismissed had their removal proceedings restarted under a new NTA and file number within a year.

“This suggests that in three-quarters of these 200,000 cases the immigrant was effectively left in legal limbo without any way to pursue asylum or other means of relief,” TRAC explained.

The investigation discovered that in 1,913 instances, cases were dismissed a second time due to untimely filings.

“This report provides an incomplete picture. 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 report concluded.

According to TRAC data, in fiscal year 2023, it took an average of 829 days to close a removal case from its opening date. Tennessee, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, and Virginia courts took more than 1,000 days.

The DHS did not respond to a request for comment from the New York Post.

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