The Immigration Scandal No One Is Talking About

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{snip} Never in any year did these officials tell the real story of a court system in crisis. Brave rhetoric and bleached numbers consistently camouflaged the courts’ disarray.

“The fight against terrorism,” the Bush and Obama administrations boldly declared from 2005 through 2012, “is the first and overriding priority of the Department of Justice. … {snip}”

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Yet court officials’ words and actions didn’t match up with a “front-line presence.” While nearly a million people ran from court over the last 22 years — meaning 37 percent of all those free pending trial failed to appear for their hearings — no alarm was sounded by those in charge.

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But gaming failures to appear in court was just one dynamic that officials suppressed to the point of dishonesty. Others, like unexecuted deportation orders, received scant official mention, but got out anyway.

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{snip} Of the 1,254,152 aliens who were ordered deported from 1996 through 2016, 76 percent of them — 953,506 to be exact — remained in the U.S. They not only remained, but grew.

From a total of 557,762 unexecuted removal orders in 2008 were added 395,744 through August 2016 — a 71 percent increase in less than eight years. Despite expanded enforcement since 2017, court records say failures to appear in court will only increase and with them, experience shows, unexecuted removal orders.

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A 1989 Government Accountability Office audit on immigration courts foreshadowed today’s extremes. It concluded that “aliens have nothing to lose by failing to appear for hearings” and noted that over the preceding 30 years illegal entry into the United States increased by 2,200 percent — from 45,000 in 1959 to 1.2 million in 1989 — and, as illegal entry grew, so did failures to appear in court.

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A 2006 Justice Department inspector general’s report agreed, stating the “program for deporting illegal aliens had been largely ineffective” and that “89 percent of nondetained aliens released into the U.S. who were subsequently issued final orders of removal were not removed.”

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What’s more is that in human terms, these trends also bring tragedies.

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