How Immigration Officials Cooked the Books and Fooled Congress for Years
20th June 2018
From 1996 through 2016, just under half of all aliens who were set free pending a trial date—1.25 million in total—were ordered removed, i.e. deported. Of that number, 952,291 were removed for evading court. Less than a quarter of this same group actually appeared in court. Over the span of more than two decades of court business, nearly two-fifths (37 percent) of those who were let free before their trial ended up fleeing court.
Since 1996, an average of 45,000 migrants each year disappeared, adding to a backlog of unexecuted removal orders that in 2016 numbered 954,000. If predictions are correct, nearly 57,000 people will evade their hearings in 2018 and bring the 23-year failure-to-appear total to 1.05 million—that’s 9.3 percent of the illegal population in the U.S. as measured by a 2017 Pew Research Center study.
It is here that damage to the courts, immigration enforcement, and national security intersect.