The House Judiciary Committee announced a probe Wednesday into massive bungling by Homeland Security, 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 a 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.
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, committee chairman, and California Rep. Tom McClintock, who heads the immigration subcommittee, said the bungle has created a mess for the immigration courts, too, 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 Republican 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 what’s known as a Notice to Appear, or NTA, which is the summons illegal immigrants are given officially putting them into deportation proceedings.
The sheer size of the surge of illegal immigrants under Mr. Biden taxed Homeland Security’s ability to handle them all, and the department has been struggling with the fallout.
In the case of the NTAs, agents at the border were issuing summonses to illegal immigrants, complete with a future court date. But Homeland Security never filed the NTAs with the immigration courts themselves.
TRAC said that means those cases “do not legally exist,” and judges have been dismissing them.
Problems with filing NTAs were almost non-existent in the Obama administration. Just 127 cases, or a tenth of a 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.
But more than 190,000 cases have been dismissed over the NTA bungle from 2021 to now, according to TRAC. That includes a staggering 80,000 cases in 2022 alone.
TRAC said 25.4% of the dismissed cases have since been refiled with NTAs.
Republicans in their letter demanded data from Homeland Security and the immigration courts to verify TRAC’s data.
The letter comes a week before the Senate is slated to take up articles of impeachment against Mr. Mayorkas. 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.