Even Government Workers Can't Keep Up With Government Paperwork

DHS drops the ball regarding asylum

The situation along the southern border of the United States has been a multi-generational problem. I was still young and carefree when Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which was supposedly going to solve the issue once and for all.

It did not.

However, that doesn’t mean the border debate has remained static throughout the years. The biggest shift — at least from where I sit — has been the increased use of claims of asylum.

There are two paths to claim asylum in the U.S. The affirmative asylum process is for individuals who are not in removal proceedings and the defensive asylum process is for individuals who are in removal proceedings. Removal proceedings are when the United States government orders that you be removed (deported) from the United States.

In the figure below, you can see the sharp increase in such claims starting in 2016, and you can guess exactly why they occur.

Back in my card-playing days, we called people who scoured the rulebook for ‘funky’ interactions with cards “rules lawyers.” (They are one of the most universally detested ‘subtype’ of player.) In the real world, these people are just called “lawyers.” (They are one of the most universally detested ‘subtype’ of person.)

And at some point, the lawyers realized that asylum claims were the ‘hack’ around United States law. Asylum seekers are granted special rights while their claims are being processed — meaning a person can show up at the border, claim asylum, and be ‘invited’ to stay in the United States. This led to the aforementioned sharp increase in asylum claims.

These claims continued to rise into 2018, and Congress was at an impasse. Remember, this was peak “sanctuary city” virtue signaling, and Democrats were claiming Trump was heartless for wanting to crack down illegal border crossings.

Understanding that most of these asylum claims would ultimately be rejected — valid reasons for asylum are pretty narrow — at the start of 2019, Trump pulled perhaps the most deft maneuver of his life: implementing the Remain in Mexico policy.

I was (and still am) impressed by this. Knowing that Congress was hopelessly gridlocked and unlikely to pass legislation, Trump used his valid Constitutional authority (itself a rarity these days) to enter into an agreement with Mexico that non-Mexicans seeking asylum in the US would stay in Mexico until their status was determined.

Faced with the prospect of being ‘stuck’ in Mexico instead of being allowed into the United States (where it’s easy to just ‘disappear’ and ignore court orders), asylum claimants dropped drastically in 2019 and 2020. (Change the incentives, change the behavior.)

Then came the election of Joe Biden.

With more than a whiff of moral superiority, Biden executive ordered away Remain in Mexico, once again allowing those claiming asylum into the United States:

And once asylum seekers were in the United States, the government spent hundreds of millions of dollars (at least) to put them up in hotels (and AirBnBs?) across the country.

Washington State

New York City

Chicago

Curiosity got the best of me, so I checked out the Chicago Lake Shore Hotel because it was actually named in the above article. You won’t be shocked to learn that the property is ‘closed’ until July 31, 2024. (I bet anything this is when the government contract expires.)

I WAS able to check out prices for August, when the cheapest room ran $159 a night during the week and $179 on the weekends.

And every room has been booked. For almost a year, by the end of it.

Is it any wonder asylum seekers are pouring over the border, overwhelming resources even in “sanctuary” cities? I’d rather get put up in a free hotel — even in Chicago — than live in most parts of Central America.

Now that I’ve (very briefly) gone over some history about asylum claims, I (finally) get to the gist of this article. Yesterday, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (which describes itself as “a data gathering, data research and data distribution organization at Syracuse University”) released a report with some shocking statistics about what’s happened since Biden reversed Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy.

That’s right, the federal government is so inept that it can’t properly process the VERY MUCH EXPECTED increase in deportation cases, most of which involve asylum claims. This report simply looked at one aspect of that failure: Failure for the government to file a Notice to Appear by the time of a scheduled hearing:

And although you might think the government’s ineptitude works in the favor of prospective immigrants, you would be mistaken:

In some instances, cases were dropped due to the lack of an NTA, refiled, then dropped again due to — you already know what I’m about to say — the lack of an NTA.

The numbers are even more shocking when broken down by location:

This is government in a nutshell. It demands the ability to do more and more stuff, which it then completely botches the entire process — to the detriment of everyone involved. (Obviously the answer to this problem is MORE FUNDING!)

It’s enough to make you Scream.

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