Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have opened an investigation into the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) mishandling of the immigration court system, which has resulted in 200,000 botched deportation cases since 2021.
“According to a recent report, since the beginning of the Biden Administration, immigration judges have dismissed roughly 200,000 cases after DHS failed to file an alien’s [Notice to Appear (NTA)] with an immigration court,” Republicans said in a letter. “For aliens in the United States, including those encountered at the border, generally the filing of an NTA begins the process to potentially remove the alien from the country. Because an alien’s removal proceedings do not begin until DHS ‘files [the NTA] with the immigration court after it is served on [the alien],’ DHS’s failure to file NTAs has resulted in hundreds of thousands of case dismissals under the Biden Administration for DHS’s ‘failure to prosecute.'”
From fiscal year 2017 through fiscal year 2020, the committee continued, there were 15,546 dismissals for failure to prosecute. Joe Biden’s administration has only refiled charges in 25.4 percent of the 200,000 unresolved cases, allowing about 150,000 illegal immigrants to remain in the country.
DHS is required to file an NTA with an immigration court before a scheduled hearing. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the data agency responsible for producing the report the Judiciary Committee referenced, added in its conclusions that “removal cases are initiated when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issues a Notice to Appear (NTA) to a noncitizen, including asylum seekers, and then files that NTA in Immigration Court. The NTA alleges that the agency has reason to believe that the individual can and should be deported, lists these reasons, and asks an Immigration Judge to issue a removal order.”
The investigation comes amid numerous reports of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants who were caught, then released, back into the U.S. — reports that highlight what Republicans referred to as “Biden’s Administration’s immigration crisis.”
Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. through the southern border in 2022, for example, brutally murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in February. Immigration and Customers Enforcement confirmed that Ibarra was known to law enforcement in 2022 and was later arrested by police, then released in New York in 2023.
In Maryland, illegal immigrant Nilson Noel Trejo-Granados was arrested for allegedly murdering two-year-old Jeremy Poou Caceres in February. A Department of Justice immigration judge had ordered Trejo-Granados’s removal from the country in November 2022, and ICE confirmed that the suspect should have been deported following the order.
“The Committee is concerned with DHS’s inaction, which exacerbates the nation’s already backlogged immigration courts and creates additional chaos,” said House Republicans.