A claim that 96 percent of asylum seekers dutifully appear for their U.S. immigration court hearings is an encouraging bit of news.
If only it were true.
Three immigration lawyers made the rosy assertion in a recent Washington Post opinion piece. The trio purported to analyze 15 years of court records and concluded that the perennially backlogged and widely criticized court system isn’t broken after all.
Former federal immigration judge Mark Metcalf knows better. He calculates that 43 percent of asylum seekers with court orders to appear never showed up for their hearings in 2016.
“Asylum seekers are primarily those who run from court and those who abscond from removal orders,” Metcalf told FAIR. “Immigration courts for years gamed failure-to-appear rates. As a judge, I knew their figures were wrong.”
Exposing the manipulation game played by immigration enthusiasts using official court data, Metcalf explained:
“Instead of calculating the failure-to-appear rate by taking the number of aliens free before trial who missed court out of all those who were free before trial, the courts pursued a different calculation.
“They took the number who skipped trial out of the much larger number of those who were free before trial plus those who were detained before trial. Including the detained (people who can’t miss court) in an equation measuring failure-to-appear rates produced the desired effect. It enlarged the denominator, shrank the numerator and gamed this important metric.
“A much reduced — and less alarming — failure-to-appear rate resulted,” he concluded.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, says the research behind the Post essay was fundamentally flawed because it only covered cases where the asylum process and proceedings were started while a family was still in custody.
“Of course they attended those hearings; they were in detention and had to go to them,” Vaughn noted.
“In half of the cases of parents with children seeking asylum, they aren’t in detention for very long (roughly 14 days) and once they are released, they don’t bother even filing an asylum application, much less go to a hearing,” she added.
Vaughn characterized the Post op-ed as “a desperate and dishonest attempt to counter the real life narrative.” To wit:
“Most illegally arriving parents seeking asylum are doing so not because they actually were persecuted or have a genuine fear of return, but because that’s what they have heard they should say that will get them released into the United States to live happily ever after, even without legal status.”
3 Comments
Speaking of fake news. Remember how the media mocked Trump for saying there were no go zones in some European cities. Absolutely not true they said, and all the left wing “fact checking” sites immediately called it “false”.
In Brussels Belgium the bus company Flixbus has announced it will no longer be making stops at a station in Brussels North. The reason is because when the buses pull in, they are immediately set on by what the police describe as “migrants from a nearby park”. Luggage is stolen and passengers are robbed at knifepoint and drivers are threatened if they intervene.
The Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels is heavily Muslim migrants. After the attack at the concert hall in Paris that killed a hundred and fifty people, one of the gunmen fled to Brussels, where he was able to hide for months because the police said residents refused to cooperate.
Police in Sweden say that there are certain neighborhoods, take one guess who lives there, that they will only enter as a large group because they are attacked otherwise. Some package delivery services refuse to enter those areas. Women are constantly assaulted.
But just listen to our media and they will tell you no way. Nothing to see, move along. And Trump is a racist for saying it.
Judge Metcalf is undoubtedly correct. When I lived in New Mexico (USA) a short while back, I was informed by a local resident he knew of “some” Illegal, undocumented Aliens living in Deming, NM. One Mexican lady, I was told, had been living in that small town for more than 35 YEARS. Oddly, the Border Patrol had its’ headquarters on J Street in Deming and could be seen patrolling Luna County on a regular basis; including the Walmart Super Center parking lot. With the number of vehicles at Walmart with Mexican license tags, one has to wonder where the owners actually live.
Further, an American acquaintance told me he had attempted to rent a Post Office Box in Columbus, NM (a small village about one mile North of the US/Mexican border); but was turned away by the Postmaster because ALL the boxes were rented; mostly to Mexicans claiming to be residents of the USA.
The evidence is clear: when an illegal alien brings one’s bambino’s – or even someone ELSE’s bambino’s – into the country, it turns into a Get-Out-of-Detention-Free card! The corrupt ‘immigration system’ is thus encouraging human smuggling. Is this a great country, or what? Once again, the Border Jumpers and coyotes are laughing at the Dumb Gringo!