The Immigration Scandal No One Is Talking About

Among the least talked about scandals in Washington is how immigration officials spent decades misleading Congress about the number of migrants evading court. I discussed that scandal at length in my last article.

In advancing this decades long effort, no accounting trick and no false narrative was out of bounds. Never in any year did these officials tell the real story of a court system in crisis. Brave rhetoric and bleached numbers consistently camouflaged the courts’ disarray.

court officials’ words and actions didn’t match up with a “front-line presence.” While nearly a million people ran from court over the last 22 years—meaning 37 percent of all those free pending trial failed to appear for their hearings—no alarm was sounded by those in charge.

“The overall failure-to-appear … rate decreased,” officials stated, “to 19 percent in 2007 from the five-year high of 39 percent in 2006.” This was pure whitewash. Accurate accounting showed the failure-to-appear rate in 2006 was 59 percent—51 percent higher than court executives admitted. Nor was the real failure-to-appear rate in 2007 a lowly 19 percent. It was 36 percent, nearly double what the courts reported to Congress.

But gaming failures to appear in court was just one dynamic that officials suppressed to the point of dishonesty. Others, like unexecuted deportation orders, received scant official mention, but got out anyway.

“All should be troubled,” wrote immigration appeals Judge Edward Grant in 2006, “by the fact that only a small fraction of final orders of deportation … are actually executed.”

Records confirm this. Of the 1,254,152 aliens who were ordered deported from 1996 through 2016, 76 percent of them—953,506 to be exact—remained in the U.S. They not only remained, but grew.

From a total of 557,762 unexecuted removal orders in 2008 were added 395,744 through August 2016—a 71 percent increase in less than eight years. Despite expanded enforcement since 2017, court records say failures to appear in court will only increase and with them, experience shows, unexecuted removal orders.

None of this is new—yet nothing has been done.

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