"Expedited" option could cut backlogs of deportable aliens
Posted by E Van Staaveren on Wed, 07/19/2017
“Expedited removal” is a term in ICE lingo which means the removal of a recently arrived illegal alien without the need to present the illegal alien to an immigration judge for a removal hearing first. There are hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens now in the U.S. whose cases have been tied up in immigration court appeals for years while the alien continues to live here, perhaps taking a job that would otherwise go to a citizen.
As described by Dan Cadman, a retired INS-ICE official with many years of experience in immigration law enforcement, “expedited removal” has been possible since 1997 but has never been fully implemented, even though the DHS has the legal authority to do so.
Cadman explains that expedited removal “ … is applicable, should the DHS secretary choose to extend it by rule, to any alien, anywhere in the United States, who has not been admitted or paroled, and who cannot prove to the satisfaction of the immigration authorities that he or she has been continuously present in the United States for at least two years.”
Cadman concludes:
“There is no excuse for not expanding its reach to the fullest potential permitted by law, certainly not when:
• There are somewhere around 11 or 12 million aliens residing and working illegally in the United States;
• There are finite resource limits to the number of officers and agents, all of whom could be used more effectively and efficiently with full implementation of expedite removal; and
• The immigration courts are so backlogged that the nationwide docket is the highest it's ever been: in excess of 610,000 pending cases as of May 2017, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
“A decision by Secretary Kelly to expand expedited removal proceedings is clearly the right thing to do; in fact, it's long overdue.”
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The complete blog, entitled The time has come to expand the reach of expedited removal to its full statutory potential, is posted on the Center for Immigration Studies’ website here.
