U.S. House Republicans are seeking answers from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas regarding the dismissal of over 200,000 deportation cases.
According to a recent report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, approximately 200,000 deportation cases have been dismissed due to the failure of DHS employees or Border Patrol agents to submit the necessary paperwork to the courts within the designated timeframe for scheduled hearings.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, and Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee Chairman Tom McClintock, a Republican from California, have initiated an investigation. They have recently sent letters to Mayorkas and Mary Cheng, the acting director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), requesting information.
According to TRAC researchers, they conducted an evaluation of data from January 2021 through February 2024 in order to analyze the number of cases that were dismissed because Notice to Appear (NTA) documents were not filed with the courts. One of the policies that Mayorkas implemented, which led to his impeachment, involved altering the detention and removal process. As part of this policy, a large number of illegal foreign nationals were released into the country and given NTAs, instructing them to appear before an immigration court several years later.
According to the law, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must file Notices to Appear (NTAs) with the corresponding court to initiate the official removal proceedings. Without the filing of NTAs, the removal process cannot commence. In cases where a hearing is scheduled before an NTA is filed, the case is dismissed, requiring the filing of a new NTA. The report reveals that only 25% of the dismissed cases had NTAs refiled.
The lack of transparency regarding the whereabouts and reasons behind these DHS failures is deeply concerning, according to TRAC researchers.
According to the researchers, they were unable to find out which agency was responsible for creating and issuing these NTAs. They suspect that most of them are created by Border Patrol agents and should be filed with the court by Customs and Border Protection. However, they do not have specific information about whether the problem is concentrated in certain sectors or locations.
According to the data, the highest number of dismissals occurred in Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, and El Paso.
NTAs are filed by agents from CBP Office of Field Operations and DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. According to TRAC, there has been no public release of information from DHS regarding the reasons and locations of these issues.
House Republicans are determined to uncover the truth.
Jordan and McClintock expressed their concern about the inaction of DHS in a letter to Mayorkas. They pointed out the data from the TRAC report and emphasized that this inaction is worsening the already backlogged immigration courts and adding to the chaos of the Biden Administration’s immigration crisis.
According to their observations, the number of deportation case dismissals, which amounted to approximately 200,000, due to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) not filing Notices to Appear (NTAs), was considerably higher than the reported “failure to prosecute” cases by DHS, which totaled over 15,500 between fiscal years 2017 and 2020.
The committee has asked Mayorkas to furnish documents and information from January 20, 2021, to the present concerning the count of cases that were dismissed by EOIR due to DHS’s failure to prosecute. They have also requested data on the number of cases mentioned in the previous question for which DHS eventually filed an NTA. Additionally, the committee has sought access to all DHS reports pertaining to cases dismissed for failure to prosecute.
In their letter to Cheng, they emphasized the same data and shared similar concerns. They asked her to provide the following information: the number of cases that EOIR dismissed due to DHS’s failure to prosecute, the number of cases mentioned in question 1 that eventually led to DHS filing an NTA, and all of EOIR’s Cognos failure to prosecute reports.
The requested material needs to be provided by April 17, according to the deadline given.
