The Massive Spike in Immigration Court ‘No-Shows’
Undermining the credibility of our immigration system; they may not care, but you should
By Andrew R. Arthur on February 2, 2024
in absentia
In October, DOJ published a chart captioned “In Absentia Removal Orders”, that is, statistics on the number of alien respondents in removal proceedings who were supposed to go to court but didn’t. It reveals that 159,379 aliens failed to appear as required before immigration judges (IJs) in FY 2023, an all-time record. It’s just the latest — but one of the clearest — in a line of examples of how the administration is breaking our immigration system. Those aliens may not care enough to show up, but you should care about the effects it has on the credibility of our system of laws to allow aliens in, and keep them out.
In Absentia Orders. The best place to start in putting all of this into context is section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which governs removal proceedings in immigration court.
Those proceedings are presided over by IJs — a job that I held for more than eight years — but I never had to worry about respondents coming to my court because I was in the late York Immigration Court, a detained facility just over the Mason-Dixon line from Maryland in Pennsylvania.
Every respondent in a detained facility must appear in court whether they want to or not. Most of my respondents were detained in the prison where my court was located and appeared in person, or in separate state or federal facilities and appeared via Video Teleconference or “VTC”.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Massive-Spike-Immigration-Court-NoShows
