The city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, has been so overwhelmed by large numbers of illegal migrants seeking asylum in the United States that it has appealed for donations of food and personal hygiene items for migrants being housed in shelters in the city.
Because of the backlog in the immigration courts, after being apprehended and brought to the court, the aliens are released until their hearings can be held.
The Border Patrol announced on April 11 that it would release migrants in southern New Mexico and in El Paso, pending their future court hearings “due to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Enforcement and Removal Operation capacity issues.”
An AP report cited a statement from Las Cruces officials that the Border Patrol dropped off 83 migrants on April 13 at the Community of Hope campus and the city’s Meerscheidt Recreation Center, which is now closed to the public because of its use as temporary housing for migrants. This was the day after they dropped off approximately 95 at a Gospel Rescue Mission homeless shelter and another campus providing social service facilities.
The Las Cruces Sun-News reported that by late in the afternoon of April 13, only about 30 of 68 migrants who had spent the night at Gospel Rescue Mission remained. The rest had begun their journeys across the country to join family members or sponsors, with whom they will live until their asylum cases come up in court.
That report optimistically presumes that all of these asylum seekers will return for their court dates. A March 2017 report from the Center for Immigration Studies noted, “American immigration courts have the highest failure to appear rates of any courts in the country. Over the last 20 years, 37 percent of all aliens free pending trial failed to appear for their hearings.”
We noted in a 2014 article (“Illegal Immigrant Children Fail to Show at Immigration Hearings”):
Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security Committee studying the illegal immigration crisis on July 9, Juan Osuna, director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review at the Department of Justice, said that about 46 percent of all children, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, who are apprehended by authorities fail to show up for hearings before immigration judges.
An article in The New American last November cited figures from Syracuse University’s TRAC Immigration site, compiled from a government report for fiscal 2018 showing how many cases were piled up in immigration courts.
The data revealed that new deportation orders had increased about five percent from 2017, from 274,133 to 287,741.
The problem is that the immigration courts are backed up with 1,098,468 cases, a 112.9 percent increase from 2017.
The flood of asylum seekers that has overwhelmed the city of Las Cruces stems from the fact that the number of illegal aliens entering our country has become too great for our immigration courts to process, thus forcing the Border Patrol to scramble for places to house them until their court dates come up.
Image: SWCargill via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Related articles:
Deportation Orders Hit Record High; Immigration Courts Clogged
