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The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday announced an investigation into massive bungling by the Homeland Security Department, which failed to file summonses with the immigration courts for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, causing some 200,000 cases to be dismissed.
The department has managed to refile the charges in only one-quarter of the cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, leaving the rest free to roam the U.S. without any case against them.
Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and committee chairman, and Rep. Tom McClintock, the California Republican who heads the immigration subcommittee, said the bungle also has created a mess for the immigration courts because judges are wasting time on the bad cases.
“The committee is concerned with DHS’ inaction, which exacerbates the nation’s already backlogged immigration courts and creates additional chaos in the Biden administration’s immigration crisis,” the two lawmakers wrote in letters to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Mary Cheng, acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees the courts.
At issue is a notice to appear, or NTA, which is the official summons putting illegal immigrants into deportation proceedings.
The sheer size of the surge of illegal immigrants under President Biden has taxed Homeland Security’s ability to handle them all, and the department is struggling with the fallout.
Agents at the border were issuing NTAs to illegal immigrants, complete with court dates, but Homeland Security never filed the NTAs with the immigration courts.
TRAC said that means those cases “do not legally exist,” and judges have been dismissing them.
Problems with filing NTAs were almost nonexistent in the Obama administration. Just 127 cases, or one-tenth of one percent, were dismissed for lack of an NTA in 2016. TRAC said that rate rose to 3%, or roughly 6,500 cases, in 2020, the last year under the Trump administration.
More than 190,000 cases have been dismissed over the NTA bungle since 2021, according to TRAC. That includes 80,000 cases in 2022 alone.
TRAC said 25.4% of the dismissed cases have been refiled with NTAs.
In their letter, Republicans demanded data from Homeland Security and the immigration courts to verify TRAC’s data.
The Senate is slated to take up articles of impeachment against Mr. Mayorkas next week. The articles accuse him of lying to the public and intentionally subverting immigration enforcement laws.
Bungling roughly 150,000 immigration cases could add to the evidence against Mr. Mayorkas at a Senate trial, though Democrats are pondering how to head off the proceedings.
The NTA bungle is among a series of backlogs built up on Mr. Biden’s watch. Experts say a future administration will have difficulty digging out of the holes.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the deportation agency, had 6.2 million people on its non-detained docket at the end of fiscal year 2023, meaning the government believes the migrants are in the country illegally and are awaiting some decision.
At least 600,000 have criminal records, according to the House Judiciary Committee.
As of December, more than 1.3 million people whose cases had been completed and had been ordered deported were defying those orders.
ICE even struggles to issue the NTAs to everyone required.
In one key test case, the Biden administration released nearly 2,600 illegal immigrants on “parole” despite a judge’s orders halting the process. The judge demanded regular updates on the government’s actions. Ten months after the releases, ICE still hadn’t served an NTA on 15% of them, including 30 who refused to check in at all.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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