Courting Disaster
Absent attendance and absent enforcement in America’s immigration courts
Courting Disaster
It began with so much promise in 2008.6 Assurances of secure borders and effective enforcement were send-ups for an immigration system badly needing both. One candidate, Barack Obama, seemed to get it. His campaign website quoted him:
In approaching immigration reform, I believe that we must enact tough, practical reforms. ... We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace. ... But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America. ... The time to fix our broken immigration system is now.
Over the past 20 years, 37 percent of all aliens free pending their trials — 918,098 out of 2,498,375 — never showed for court.39Courtrooms, like borders, are porous. On average, 46,00040 people each year vanished from proceedings created specifically for those claiming persecution in the lands they called home.41 Few things diminish a court system more. "Failures to appear", write court observers, "undermine the integrity of the justice system" and "erode the respect that an independent judiciary deserves."42More than respect was eroded, though. Enforcement was disabled.
These are not sudden failures, but incremental ones. Successive presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, have authored problems that today fall just short of chaos in the operation of these courts. Their legacies — actions in the past that influence the present — are one source of this disorder. They have been abetted by generations of court executives who've hidden the bright markers of disarray to produce testimony and reports that from one year to the next misinformed Congress and the public.
The most definitive source of failure, though, was the Obama administration. Insisting borders were secure and enforcement effective17 as tens of thousands entered unhindered18 and hundreds of thousands more were never removed19 made worse the problems it inherited. Both national and domestic security are today jeopardized in the wake of this maladministration.20 For a presidency that promised better, borders remain porous,21 enforcement slack,22 backlogs endless,23 court evasion commonplace,24 and removal orders unexecuted.25 Disorder — in this instance, a policy of injuries inflicted by a government upon its institutions, citizens, and hopefuls alike — rules, along with its calamitous twin, deception.26
Absent attendance and absent enforcement in America’s immigration courts
Courting Disaster
It began with so much promise in 2008.6 Assurances of secure borders and effective enforcement were send-ups for an immigration system badly needing both. One candidate, Barack Obama, seemed to get it. His campaign website quoted him:
In approaching immigration reform, I believe that we must enact tough, practical reforms. ... We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace. ... But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America. ... The time to fix our broken immigration system is now.
Over the past 20 years, 37 percent of all aliens free pending their trials — 918,098 out of 2,498,375 — never showed for court.39Courtrooms, like borders, are porous. On average, 46,00040 people each year vanished from proceedings created specifically for those claiming persecution in the lands they called home.41 Few things diminish a court system more. "Failures to appear", write court observers, "undermine the integrity of the justice system" and "erode the respect that an independent judiciary deserves."42More than respect was eroded, though. Enforcement was disabled.
These are not sudden failures, but incremental ones. Successive presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, have authored problems that today fall just short of chaos in the operation of these courts. Their legacies — actions in the past that influence the present — are one source of this disorder. They have been abetted by generations of court executives who've hidden the bright markers of disarray to produce testimony and reports that from one year to the next misinformed Congress and the public.
The most definitive source of failure, though, was the Obama administration. Insisting borders were secure and enforcement effective17 as tens of thousands entered unhindered18 and hundreds of thousands more were never removed19 made worse the problems it inherited. Both national and domestic security are today jeopardized in the wake of this maladministration.20 For a presidency that promised better, borders remain porous,21 enforcement slack,22 backlogs endless,23 court evasion commonplace,24 and removal orders unexecuted.25 Disorder — in this instance, a policy of injuries inflicted by a government upon its institutions, citizens, and hopefuls alike — rules, along with its calamitous twin, deception.26
