Migrants are being turned away from immigration courts because ICE gave them ‘fake dates’

More than a dozen immigrants have showed up for deportation court hearings in Dallas only to find that they were never actually added to the dockets and have been given by ICE what court officials described as ‘fake dates,’ according to a new report.

The immigrants were turned away, as have others in Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami, according to The Dallas Morning News.

In some cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have instructed immigrants to arrive in court on weekends, at midnight, or even on non-existent dates – Sept. 31, for example.

ICE arrested 160 immigrants on Aug. 28 at Load Trail in Sumner, Texas. The raid was the agency’s largest on record since 2008. Now many of the immigrants have been assigned ‘fake dates’ to appear in immigration court, making it harder for them to fight their deportation proceedings

With a backlog of nearly 750,000 cases nationwide, the issue is throwing a new wrench into an already strained immigration court system.

Many of the immigrants turned away in Texas were arrested on Aug. 28 during the largest workplace ICE has conducted in a decade. That operation, at Load Trail in Sumner, Texas (about 100 miles northeast of Dallas), netted 160 arrests.

Many of those arrested were released with a notice to appear in court, but when they arrived they were told to fill out a new form and instructed to call a phone number repeatedly until they receive a new court date.

 It’s an attempt to fulfill the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law. It’s either arrogance, or possibly a desire to cause the system to implode.                               -Former immigration Judge Jeffrey S. Chase

‘It’s a madhouse,’ said Dalila Reynoso, a church employee who has been helping workers and their families since the raid in Sumner.

A spokesman for ICE referred DailyMail.com to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which falls under the DOJ. The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Santos Monroy, 29, told the Dallas Morning News that he had worked for Load Trail for six years before the arrest, and that now the Mexican national is losing sleep because he is worried about his immigration status and how he will take care of his wife and four children.

‘I am always thinking of what will happen tomorrow,’ he said.

Immigration attorneys say the root of the problem is a June 21 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a case known as Pereira v. Sessions. The ruling in that case requires the federal government to put dates and court locations on all notices to appear in immigration court.

While not every state has immigration court, immigrants living in each state have cases before an immigration judge. This map illustrates where in the U.S. people with pending immigration cases are living

For many years, a large number of those notices would be mailed to immigrants with no actual date, time or place to appear. In some cases immigrants were ordered deported despite their lack of proper notice to appear.

‘Given today’s advanced software capabilities, it is hard to imagine why DHS and immigration courts could not again work together to schedule hearings before sending notices to appear,’ wrote Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the decision on Pereira.

Now it appears that the Department of Homeland Security is attempting to comply – even if the dates and times being assigned to immigrants are not actually logged in the court system and coordinated across agencies.

‘It’s an attempt to fulfill the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law,’ former immigration Judge Jeffrey S. Chase told DailyMail.com. ‘It’s either arrogance, or possibly a desire to cause the system to implode. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Ashley Huebner, the Chicago-based associate director of legal services for the National Immigrant Justice Center told the Dallas Morning News that she has come across ‘dozens and dozens’ of immigrants with ‘dummy dates’ on their court appearance documents. Many travel long distances to get their day in court, only to be turned away.

‘The immigration court system is confusing enough on a normal day,’ Huebner said. ‘But to have an individual who probably does not speak English … and receives a document in which DHS has purposely listed a fake date and time is a real different level of confusion and absurdity.’

In the meantime, ICE is ramping up its enforcement efforts, even as the bottleneck in immigration courts continues to grow.

The backlog in immigration cases has increased 38 percent since President Trump took office, according to government data. 

The backlog of immigration cases has risen steadily over the past decade, but has jumped significantly since President Trump took office

Nationwide, there were 746,049 pending cases as of July 31 – up from 542,411 at the end of January 2017, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. 

As of July 20, ICE had more than tripled the number of work site investigations it conducted so far in 2018.

Since October 1, 2017 – the beginning of fiscal year 2018 – ICE has opened investigations into 6,093 workplaces, compared to 1,716 in all of fiscal year 2017.

The agency also made 984 administrative arrests as of July 20 of this year, nearly six times the 172 officials made the year prior. Administrative arrests are when someone is accused of being in the country illegally, but they haven’t been charged with any other crimes.

ICE officials also increased the number of criminal arrests it made, taking in 675 immigrants compared to 139 in all of 2017.

Altogether, the 1,659 arrests made so far in FY2018 amount to five times the 311 arrests of FY2017. 

Ten states were responsible for a majority of the increase in case backlogs within U.S. immigration courts since President Trump took office

Read more at DailyMail.co.uk