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The Obama administration’ use of executive power to allow some law-abiding undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and work legally has had only limited impact, according to two new reports released this week.
After the administration announced in 2011 that it would engage in a top-to-bottom review of roughly 300,000 pending deportation cases, immigrant advocates hoped that officials would drop a significant number of cases under this “prosecutorial discretion” policy and allow undocumented immigrants to remain.
But a study by the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, a project of Syracuse University, found that those reviews have so far only cleared 7 percent of cases nationwide. Meanwhile, the backlog in deportation cases has continued to grow, as more and more people are targeted for deportation.
The report also found a wide regional discrepancy in the reviews, performed by Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. For instance, the Seattle court closed almost a quarter of its cases, while the Newark court only closed 1.6 percent.
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