President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is putting fewer than 2-in-10 migrants into deportation proceedings after releasing them into the United States via its parole pipeline, court records reveal.
“These statistics are troubling to say the least,” District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II writes in court documents. “But even more troubling is the fact that DHS apparently does not have a plan in place to track down the aliens who are in violation of the conditions of their ‘parole’ — and, thus, unlawfully in the country.”
Among nearly 2,600 migrants that DHS released into the U.S. interior with parole, more than 41 percent have yet to check in with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency as required. DHS officials admit they have little idea where the migrants have ended up.
Meanwhile, even when migrants do check in with ICE, they are often still not served a Notice to Appear (NTA) which would formally put them into deportation proceedings. In total, only 18 percent of migrants — among the nearly 2,600 tracked for the court — have been issued an NTA.
The figure indicates that 82 percent of migrants have not been placed into deportation proceedings as they were supposed to be.
“Given that the initiation of removal proceedings is what was supposed to happen if the alien had checked in as directed, it is hard to understand why DHS thinks that aliens will take any of its directives seriously if their ‘punishment’ for not doing so ends up being the same thing that would have happened if they complied,” Wetherell wrote.