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Biden Administration Quietly Allowing ‘Silent Amnesty’ of Migrants

The Biden administration is quietly allowing a “silent amnesty” by suspending or dismissing thousands of deportation cases pending in immigration courts, The Washington Times reported on Monday.

Terminating or dismissing a case removes it from the active docket, granting migrants de facto permission to stay in the country even though they do not hold legal status.

Deportation orders, as a percentage of decided cases, have decreased to 35% from January to June, which is about half the rate of the last two years of the Trump administration.

The number of case terminations has also gone up sharply even though immigration judges are deciding fewer cases.

“They’re dismissing these cases out of hand, and then ICE is releasing these people from custody,” one Justice Department source told the Times.

Jeremy McKinney, the president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association said that “implementation of the current adminstration’s common-sense immigration enforcement priorities are shifting those cases away from prolonged litigation and towards resolution through established paths of legal immigration.”

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and currently a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, pointed to a May memo from John Trasvina, the principal legal adviser at ICE, who urged the agency’s attorneys to use prosecutorial discretion to curtail deportations.

“Given that Biden’s new DHS leadership started signaling its intentions for immigration non-enforcement on day one, hundreds if not thousands of aliens (and more precisely, their lawyers) likely approached ICE after the inauguration to request prosecutorial discretion,” Arthur wrote.

Bolstering that theory is that a coalition of immigration lawyers urged just that course of action.

The coalition wrote in a March memo to lawyers that “if your client is subject to any of the enforcement actions mentioned above, or your client is in removal proceedings, and you believe that your client is not an enforcement priority under the new DHS and ICE guidance or merits prosecutorial discretion for another compelling reason, you should make a formal, written request for prosecutorial discretion as soon as possible, regardless of the stage of the case.”

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