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One in six new cases coming before U.S. immigration courts is being dismissed because of missing “Notice to Appear” paperwork, a research group reports.
The dismissal rate is much higher in some dedicated docket courts designed to speed up immigration hearings. The immigration court in Miami has an 81% dismissal rate so far in fiscal year 2022; the one in Boston stands at 62% while those in Houston and El Paso report rates of 54% and 32%, respectively, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
The nationwide 16.6% dismissal rate dwarfs that of fiscal year 2018 (0.3%) and the 2013 rate of 0.2%, which is the oldest quoted in the study and typical of how rare dismissals use to be.
“This is the initial master calendar hearing, the equivalent of an arraignment to sort things out,” said Susan Long, statistician and co-founder of TRAC. “I’m told it means the NTA has been closed out. The big question is, what happens next? We don’t have an answer yet.”
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