Over 63,000 DHS Cases Thrown Out of Immigration Court This Year Because No NTA Was Filed

TRAC, Oct. 17, 2022

"As of the end of September 2022, Immigration Court judges dismissed a total of 63,586 cases because Department of Homeland Security officials, chiefly Border Patrol agents, are not filing the actual “Notice to Appear” (NTA) with the Immigration Court. Without a filed NTA, the case cannot proceed. This means that one out of every six Court cases were thrown out for this reason this past fiscal year. As TRAC earlier reported, this failure to file a NTA was rare until Border Patrol agents were given the authority to use the Immigration Court’s Interactive Scheduling System (ISS). Using ISS, the agents can directly schedule the initial hearing (i.e. a master calendar hearing) at the Immigration Court. Supposedly, the actual NTA is created at the same time, and a copy given to the asylum seeker or other noncitizen with the scheduled hearing location and time they are to show up in Court noted on the NTA. Thus, the process only requires that CBP actually follow up with the ministerial task of seeing that the Court also receives a copy of the NTA. With the implementation of the Court’s ECAS system of e-filing, this should have made the process quick and straightforward. But this hasn’t occurred for many cases as the latest case-by-case Court records show. These data were obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University through a series of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests, and then analyzed for this report by TRAC. ..."