A report from the Justice Department on a pilot program to discover if illegal aliens applying for asylum actually showed up for their initial court hearing found that 90 percent of those who file asylum papers and are released into the interior of the country never show up.
Since December 21, 2018, DHS has released at least 190,500 border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the United States. Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan told Congress this month that those foreign nationals are eventually given work permits that allow them to take U.S. jobs while awaiting their asylum hearings.
In testimony before Congress this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said that the agency had recently conducted a pilot program with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to test how many recent illegal aliens would show up to their asylum hearings after being released into the U.S.
The results, an ICE official told Congress, were that about 87 percent of illegal aliens, or almost 9-in-10, recently released by DHS into the U.S. did not show up to their asylum hearings. With illegal aliens not showing up to their scheduled hearings, the ICE official said, the agency is then forced to grapple with attempting to locate and deport each illegal alien, an almost impossible task that strains federal resources.
This report flies in the face of other studies that show 65-70 percent of illegals showing up for court. But that information comes with two big caveats.
First, the most recent data is from 2016 — before this most recent tidal wave of asylum seekers began arriving. It should be noted that as the numbers of asylum seekers rose, the no-show rate in court rose as well. The significance is that there are two kinds of asylum seekers; those who show up at the border and report directly to immigration officials asking for U.S. protection and those who are caught entering the country illegally. The first kind is called an “affirmative” asylum request while the second group usually makes their plea for asylum during their court appearance. These are called “defensive” claims of asylum.
The second caveat is that most of the asylum seekers belong to family units.
“That particular population, as we continue to release into the interior hundreds if not thousands of family units into the interior every week, is of grave concern as it relates to these individuals not appearing before immigration judges and now being fugitives,” the ICE official said.
In the same hearing, another federal immigration official said that only about 12 percent of border crossers and illegal aliens who complete their asylum processes actually end up qualifying for asylum — a statistic that underscores the enormous fraud and abuse in the country’s immigration system.
What this pilot program found is that the game has changed. It may have been true previously that a small majority of illegals showed up for their court hearing. But this is dated information. The recent surge in Central American migration has altered the situation entirely.
The DoJ study only looked at those illegals who were caught and released into the interior of the county. That only 10 percent of illegals released bother to show up for their court date means that this year alone, hundreds of thousands of those migrants who entered the U.S. illegally failed to appear and were subject to deportation proceedings.
If they can be found.
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