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Midway through fiscal year 2021, U.S. immigration courts are allowing significantly more illegal aliens to remain in this country.
Of 68,962 deportation cases processed, only 42 percent resulted in removals, the lowest percentage since 1988. Court-ordered deportation rates during the previous four years ranged from 57-72 percent. On the current trajectory, court deportations this year will be less than half the totals recorded in either 2020 or 2019.
Court watchers are not sure why this is happening, but we have some ideas.
Austin Kocher, chief researcher at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), points to court closures during the coronavirus pandemic. While that surely exacerbated the backlog of cases, now numbering 1.3 million, curtailed court hours do not explain the disproportional shift away from deportations.
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