Nearly 200,000 deportation cases have been thrown out during President Joe Biden’s administration because the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hadn’t filed the necessary court appearance paperwork to proceed with the removals, according to a new analysis of the cases.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research organization sponsored by Syracuse University, released a new report on March 20 detailing the rates at which deportation cases are being derailed when U.S. immigration authorities fail to file a key document known as a notice to appear (NTA).
When initiating deportation proceedings, DHS officials must provide an NTA to a noncitizen they believe is subject to removal. An NTA form is used to describe the allegations for which DHS officials believe a noncitizen should be deported, and DHS officials must provide an immigration judge with a copy of this form before the initial case hearing for a removal case to proceed. Failure to file this form can upend the case.
According to the TRAC data, there were 33,802 deportation cases dismissed for a lack of proper NTA paperwork in fiscal 2021, which began in October 2020 during the final months of President Donald Trump’s term.
Fiscal 2022 saw 79,592 deportation cases dismissed for a lack of proper NTA paperwork. In fiscal 2023, that number still stood at about 68,869.
Thrown-Out Cases Increased in Recent Years
The overall percentage of cases dismissed over NTA paperwork errors has also gone up during the Biden administration.
In 2014, about 0.1 percent of immigration cases were dismissed over these NTA paperwork issues. That number rose to 0.2 percent by 2018. That number increased six-fold in fiscal 2019, with about 1.2 percent of immigration cases thrown out over missing NTA paperwork, or about 8,192 of the 673,395 total immigration cases handled that year.
There were 198,886 immigration cases initiated in fiscal 2020, the lowest number since at least fiscal 2014. Although the overall number of deportation cases dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic era, the percentage of those cases thrown out over NTA paperwork problems nearly tripled, to 3.3 percent that year.
By fiscal 2021, the number of yearly immigration cases had risen to 317,582 and the percentage of those cases thrown out for NTA paperwork fumbles hit 10.6 percent.
There were 794,946 in fiscal 2022, surpassing the fiscal 2019 highpoint and all other pre-pandemic years since at least 2014. In total, about 10 percent of all cases that year were thrown out over NTA paperwork errors.
The percentage of immigration cases thrown out over NTA paperwork errors fell in fiscal 2023. However, the total number of immigration cases in fiscal 2023 hit 1,439,305, nearly double that of the year prior. In all, about 4.8 percent of the cases were tossed because DHS officials didn’t submit NTA paperwork with the immigration courts on time.
As of this point in fiscal 2024, with data through February, TRAC has identified 980,262 new immigration cases. The 10,598 cases that have been dismissed so far this fiscal year for NTA paperwork errors amount to about 1.1 percent of all cases before the immigration courts.
The TRAC report states the rising percentages of immigration cases dismissed over NTA paperwork gaps coincide with the introduction of a new filing system in U.S. immigration courts.
“Ten years ago, DHS’s failure to file an NTA before the scheduled first hearing was rare,” the TRAC analysis states. “However, the frequency increased once Border Patrol agents and other DHS personnel were given access to the Immigration Court’s Interactive Scheduling System (ISS).”
Before getting access to the ISS, DHS officials would file the NTAs and provide them to the immigration courts, and the courts would then typically schedule the initial court appearances. Now that DHS officials have access to ISS, they can schedule the initial court date at the same time they provide a noncitizen with an NTA form.
TRAC posits that DHS officials increasingly relying on ISS are scheduling initial hearings and providing NTAs to people arriving at the U.S. southern border faster than they are actually able to provide immigration courts with the corresponding NTA paperwork.
DHS Restarts Just 1 in 4 Dismissed Cases: Analysis
Although the immigration courts can throw out a deportation case in which an NTA wasn’t filed before the initial hearing date, DHS officials still have an opportunity to try initiating deportation proceedings.If a case is thrown out, DHS officials generally can’t restart the case without first generating a new NTA. Regenerating this paperwork restarts deportation proceedings under a new case file number.
TRAC acknowledges it’s difficult to determine whether a dismissed deportation effort is restarted because the initial case file number won’t be linked to the new case file when the effort is restarted. TRAC said it was able to match up new removal proceedings to past dismissed cases by collecting immigration court records covering the past 10 years.
Based on its ability to scrutinize these court records, TRAC said it was able to determine that about three-quarters of the deportation cases thrown out over NTA paperwork problems during the Biden era remain in limbo, with no efforts taken thus far to restart the deportation proceedings.
The percentage of cases DHS attempts to restart has gone up. In fiscal 2019, about 23 percent of previously dismissed cases were restarted. That number dropped to 14 percent in fiscal 2020 and came back up to 24 percent in fiscal 2021. By fiscal 2022, about 25 percent of previously dismissed cases were restarted, and in fiscal 2023, that number rose to 27 percent.
Still, restarting these deportation proceedings isn’t a guarantee that the cases will move forward more smoothly than they did the first time.
“DHS sometimes needs more than a second try to get it right,” the report states. “TRAC’s analysis found that on 1,913 occasions, the issuance of a new NTA was dismissed yet again because the second filing was also untimely. That is, neither the initial NTA nor the replacement NTA had been timely filed with the Court at the time of the scheduled hearings.”
