Misunderstanding the Numbers: Aliens Who Disappear Before Trial
By Mark Metcalf on January 26, 2019
A policy analyst with the American Immigration Council, an offshoot of the immigration lawyers' lobby, recently tweeted a critique of my new report, "Skipping Court: U.S. Immigration Courts & Aliens Who Disappear Before Trial". The analysis, by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, falls short as an informed critique.
Try as he might to prove otherwise, 37 percent of all final orders in removal cases from 1996 through 2017 were issued to aliens who failed to appear for their hearings. Forty-three percent did the same in 2017 and 42 percent did so from 2015 through 2017.1 "Failures to appear", write court observers Timothy R. Schnacke, Michael R. Jones, and Dorian M. Wilderman, "undermine the integrity of the justice system, as each FTA tends to erode the respect that an independent judiciary deserves."2 These critics try to fix the problem; Reichlin-Melnick tries to explain it away. Here's why he's wrong.
Reichlin-Melnick makes the same mistakes that EOIR does in figuring failure to appear rates. EOIR includes detained aliens to calculate failure to appear rates. Obviously, aliens detained pending their hearings cannot miss court, but enlarging the denominator by including those in custody pending trial predictably shrinks the numerator of those who skipped court. This is the way EOIR has reported failures to appear and concealed high failures to appear for the last 22 years.
https://cis.org/Metcalf/Misunderstanding-Numbers-Aliens-Who-Disappear-Trial
