More than 350,000 immigrants who entered the United States illegally had their cases dismissed in immigration courts, allowing them to be released without a verdict on the merits of their entry, an explosive new report indicates.
A senior advisor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Kerry Doyle, circulated a memo in 2022 instructing prosecutors to dismiss cases of immigrants who are not considered threats to national security, The New York Post first reported.
As a result, nearly 103,000 immigrants had their cases dismissed that year, allowing them to freely enter the United States without an immigration judge’s ruling on the merits of their asylum claim.
Later, in 2023, that number of dismissed cases skyrocketed to 149,000.
So far in fiscal year 2024, 114,000 cases have been concluded without a verdict, according to the report.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent monitors as migrants enter the United States after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico in Eagle Pass, Texas. The agent had cut coils of barbed wire to let them through for processing.
Under Biden’s leadership, a whopping 77 percent of immigrants seeking asylum have been allowed to remain in the United States, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)a nonprofit organization that reviews immigration court records.
In fact, under Biden, the most popular way for immigrants to remain in the country under formal asylum proceedings is not for a judge to grant them relief, but for that judge to dismiss the case entirely, following guidelines from Doyle in 2022. memo.
“This is simply a mass amnesty disguised as prosecutorial discretion,” a former immigration judge now working for the Center for Immigration Studies, Andrew Arthur, told The Post.
“You’re basically allowing people who have no right to be in the United States to be here indefinitely,” he continued.
ICE officials who spoke with The Post indicated that although these migrants’ cases are dismissed after being found without criminal records, they still commit crimes after being released into the interior of the United States.
This forces these agents to start deportation proceedings again, which sometimes takes years and surely costs resources provided by taxpayers.
ICE General Counsel Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, ordered immigration courts not to issue verdicts in asylum cases in which people were found not to have national security flags, according to the report. .
ICE officers who spoke to The Post pleaded with them to “let everyone know” that this type of mass dismissal of cases is occurring and subsequently making their jobs more difficult.
Newly arrived migrants in Chicago receive food during winter storm
“If immigrants, whom ICE no longer controls or monitors, commit crimes after dismissal, ICE will have to start over and issue a new Notice to Appear in Court and start the clock again,” an ICE official said in The report.
“Please let everyone know what’s really going on,” an ICE officer pleaded with the Post.
Currently, the backlog of asylum cases in the United States is around 3.5 million, sources told the outlet.
They highlighted how removing more than 100,000 cases annually from the system without rendering a verdict helps improve the Biden administration’s optics.
Once cases are closed, immigrants exit their ‘removal procedure,’ which is the automatic classification for all immigrants admitted to the border.
Once their removal proceedings are closed, these immigrants are no longer subject to deportation, meaning they can remain within the US.
These immigrants are also exempt from ICE oversight and will no longer be monitored, unlike those still in the asylum process in court.
Still, after cases are dismissed, immigrants can reapply for asylum while in the US.
Trying to obtain asylum is useful for immigrants because it allows them to obtain work permits and benefits provided by the United States.
Migrants rest in Mexico on May 31 before continuing their journey to the US-Mexico border
Meanwhile, Biden is expected to move forward with an executive order on immigration this week.
The White House is weighing a policy that would limit the number of encounters with immigrants to 4,000 a day for a week — 28,000 in total.
Once that threshold is reached, authorities would supposedly close the border between the United States and Mexico.
Executive action could come as early as Tuesday, although the exact timing remains unclear.
