“De Facto Amnesty”: Biden Admin Dismissing “Stacks” Of Illegal Alien Cases
Since April 25, 2022, “between 60,000 and 80,000 cases have been closed, according to the ICE attorney.”
While all eyes are understandably on the Supreme Court’s long-awaited overturning of Roe, keep in mind that the Biden administration is always busy furthering its radical America Last agenda.
Case in point: the Washington Examiner is reporting that the Biden administration is “quietly” dismissing “stacks” of cases against illegal aliens; the stacks are substantive enough that as many as one million could be effectively pardoned in this way by 2024.
Federal prosecutors are quietly dismissing stacks of cases against illegal immigrants under a Biden administration mandate that could be on pace to effectively pardon 1 million people by 2024, according to leaked information reviewed by @dcexaminer.https://t.co/LnuTmmQokj
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) June 24, 2022
The Washington Examiner reports:
Federal prosecutors are quietly dismissing stacks of cases against illegal immigrants under a Biden administration mandate that could be on pace to effectively pardon 1 million people by 2024, according to leaked information reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Attorneys for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have begun to throw out tens of thousands of the 2 million backlogged cases in immigration court following a political appointee’s order not to go after illegal border crossers from before the November 2020 election.
“This is a de facto amnesty,” said an ICE federal prosecutor who spoke with the Washington Examiner on the condition of anonymity.
The Washington Examiner obtained leaked video recordings of virtual meetings that Kerry Doyle, ICE’s principal legal adviser, held with the more than 1,200 ICE prosecutors who bring cases against illegal immigrants nationwide, in which she explained in detail who should not be targeted for deportation. Illegal immigrants identified as national security and public safety threats, or those who had crossed the border illegally after Nov. 1, 2020, would be the only cases ICE would pursue. All others would be dropped.
The memo went out at the end of April, and already “between 60,000 and 80,000 cases have been closed.”
The Washington Examiner continues:
“As the memo explains — I think pretty clearly — we’ve put our thumb sort of heavily in favor of dismissal and durable solutions,” Doyle told her workforce in a private town hall meeting on April 14. “Even if you’ve spent a lot of time on the case, if it’s a nonpriority, you should be moving to offer [prosecutorial discretion] in that case.”
Doyle’s mandate to close out cases took effect on April 25. An indicator of how quickly ICE has moved is the number of cases wiped out in those two months. Between 60,000 and 80,000 cases have been closed, according to the ICE attorney. The total case closures since the start of fiscal year 2022 last October is more than 97,000, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University in New York. Case closures eight months into 2022 are already up fourfold from all of 2021, another sign of how quickly ICE prosecutors are moving to clear the books.
If the agency’s 1,200 prosecutors keep the current pace of 60,000-80,000 case closures every two months, ICE could hit 360,000 to 480,000 closed cases by next April and 1 million by early summer 2024, months before the presidential election.
The left loves to pretend that they care about people, particularly “brown” people (a term I loathe), but is that really what’s going on when Doyle is, in some cases, removing the ability of asylum-seekers to work legally in this country?
In one example, Doyle said in cases in which a person has requested asylum and received a work permit while they await that asylum decision, an attorney should “as a general rule” still move to dismiss the case despite it costing the individual his or her ability to work legally in the country. She provided no alternative for the person to find work.
As usual, the radical left lumps all “brown” people into one box and is treating asylum seekers who may (or may not) have a legitimate asylum claim as if they are illegal aliens sneaking into the country in direct violation of the law. This “equity” is stripping them of their ability to hold a legal job here. It’s outrageous.
The Doyle-mandated “prosecutorial discretion” is being (rightly) ridiculed as an oxymoron.
“This mandatory requirement was imposed under the guise of ‘prosecutorial discretion’ and allegedly for the purpose of freeing up busy immigration prosecutors to focus on the most important cases. But this is a canard. There is no actual discretion,” the ICE attorney said. “Do as Doyle commands or else.”
Andrew R. Arthur, former immigration judge and resident fellow of law and policy at the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, pointed out that Doyle’s mandate is illogical and that the administration is forcing attorneys’ hands.
“The whole idea behind ‘prosecutorial discretion’ is that the prosecutor exercises it or not. ‘Mandatory prosecutorial discretion’ is an oxymoron,” Arthur wrote in a recent blog post.
The leftward lurch continues unabated. They can’t “abolish ICE,” so they gut it. Maybe it’s time Republicans took a page from their playbook and started gutting all the harmful, politicized, useless, and / or wasteful alphabet agencies GOP voters don’t like.
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Comments
This can’t be Constitutional.
Can it?!
Technically? Of course it is. Prosecutorial discretion, remember? The executive has sole discretion not to bring a case, or to dismiss one that has been brought. (Except in the case of Michael Flynn, because reasons. But even in that case all the judge could do was drag things out; eventually he would have had to accept the dismissal.)
The previous potus election wasn’t constitutional, so why would these cancerous commies be concerned with an open border invasion?
Full speed ahead with The Great Replacement!, comrade.
The American people must March down lock and loaded and stop this insanity
We are being invaded
It’s so disgusting
Obviously totally criminal.
It stinks to high heaven, but it’s not an actual crime. The next GOP president should remember this and follow the example. Every case pending against violators of stupid regulations and laws that we oppose should be dropped.
Especially against the 1/6 political prisoners.
It’s definitely a “high crime and misdemeanor” for which the house and two thirds of the senate would be justified in impeaching those responsible, including both Mayorkas and Biden. But of course they don’t want to, so that’s moot.
No, the federal government has abdicated its role to protect its citizens from invasion.
No. That is completely wrong and backwards. The discretion does not belong to the individual employee who has been assigned to the case! That employee is just a functionary; he is not the prosecutor. The discretion belongs to the actual elected prosecutor, who is Joseph R. Biden. He has delegated that authority to Mayorkas, who has delegated it to Doyle. So long as that delegation stands, it’s her discretion, which she is entitled to order her underlings to carry out.
The idea that civil servants have rights to their own discretion, independent of their superiors, is destructive and evil and must be squashed, even when it’s a Dem administration telling them to do things we don’t like. Because that same idea operates during R administrations, with civil servants undermining the president’s policies because they think they have some kind of right to act on their own judgment and do what they think the country needs instead of what their boss the president says.
I would quibble a bit. The concept of prosecutorial discretion is predicated on the idea that each case is evaluated independently based on upon it’s unique factors. Where some mitigating factors or circumstances are identified to outweigh the interest of the State in enforcement then a decision to forego prosecution may be warranted.
Here we have a blanket policy set by a political appointee. That isn’t prosecutorial discretion, it’s a policy choice that deviates from the statute. A choice that turns what should be a rare event into a mandatory action.
Consider that one cited reason for the policy is that the system is overwhelmed with a backlog of cases. What cases? People entering the US illegally. The Admin is as a practical matter refusing to enforce border security to prevent entry. Then hands out a CT date to hundreds of thousands of additional people each month releasing them into the interior.
The admin is creating the backlog by their actions then using the backlog to justify a mandatory refusal to prosecute. When viewed in context this isn’t a discretionary act rather it’s a series of deliberate choices leading to a defacto amnesty that Congress didn’t authorize.
You can certainly say that this isn’t a proper use of discretion. But the point made by the functionaries quoted is that the discretion belongs to them, and they’re outraged that their boss is taking it into her hands. And that is perverted and evil and we should resist it. No, Mr functionary, it is not your discretion, it’s your boss’s, and you were only ever entitled to use it with her permission and as she directed. If you don’t like that, resign your job and run for your boss’s office. In the case of federal prosecutors the constitution is clear that all executive power rests in one person, the president, and DOJ exercises it only on his behalf. It has no independent authority, and even if it did that would belong to the AG, not to each lawyer with a job there.
On your other point, that discretion must be exercised on a case-by-case basis, not necessarily. It may involve higher-level policy decisions, such as that a certain class of prosecutions are not in the public interest and shouldn’t be pursued. Such as prosecuting marijuana violations. Or enforcing sodomy laws, before those were struck down.
I suppose I am arguing for what should be v what is actually occurring. At root all prosecutors belong to the executive branch. The legislative branch creates laws. When prosecutors abandon entire categories of infractions that’s not, IMO, a use of discretion. It is as you concede a setting of setting priorities.
The role of the executive is to enforce the laws created by legislature as a matter of first principles. Where they refuse to do so for entire categories of infractions v applying judgement to the individual circumstances of a unique case to meet their burden to achieve the interests of justice that’s not exercise of discretion. Instead it is a substitution of their will in place of the legislature.
You are very correct in describing how the matter of discretion which is supposed to be the rare exception has morphed into a nearly unrecognizable and absurd variant in modern jurisprudence. Your description is the reality we face v my somewhat quaint description and I don’t disagree with that at all.
“At root all prosecutors belong to the executive branch. ” Is that true? All prosecutors are officers of the court, which is the judicial branch. The Attorney General is a part of the Executive, but that’s because he represents the side of the government, as an officer of the court when he is in court, rather than in the role of providing legal advice and counsel (and there’s a separate Office of Legal Counsel that sounds like it has that role).
Granted Article 3 courts don’t necessarily even exist anymore, but we pretend they do to a great extent, and it would be consistent to consider those prosecutors as a part of our simulated Article 3 infrastructure.
Art 3 CT compose the entirety of the federal judiciary, aka Federal Judges and Federal Magistrates. Federal prosecutors are members of the Art 2 executive. They are in separate branches with separate roles, funded by separate pots of money.
Treason. If any of The Founders were alive there’d be people hung for allowing this obvious breach of their Oath of Office.
This is indefensible, contemptible and disgraceful. The dotard-marionette occupying the White House geriatric ward, and, his vile, Dumb-o-crat comrades, find new ways every day to undermine the rule of law and societal harmony and safety.
Clearly, our federal government has abandoned the original agreement that made the United States united. This doesn’t work if the feds will not honor their part of the deal. I’m not a lawyer but I believe breach of contract nullifies the contract and no longer binding.
So, if the states are no longer being served by a hostile and rogue federal government, maybe the path to Mark Levin’s proposed Article V Convention of States should be to add another item re-affirming the US Constitution among the states as a predicate to the convention and then agree to form a new federal government.
If we are going to save the United States, it would be helpful to prove that the states themselves are still united. It’s the federal part that has gone rogue.
Now for Milhouse to step in and explain why trying is the first step to failure and so we shouldn’t even try because……
A convention is not merely the first step to failure; if failure were the worst that could happen, then you may as well try. But it’s the first step to disaster, and to a situation much worse than we have now. The constitution to emerge from any convention, no matter what restrictions are placed on it in advance, will be a leftists’ dream, or a normal person’s nightmare.
No, the right thing is to part ways. Rather than roping in all the states and imposing a “democratic” process there, just end the agreement full stop. After all the “convention of the states” language is a part of the agreement you are saying is null and void.
Can the cases be reopened in the next administration?
Short answer is probably yes. The argument against would be that those who benefited have a ‘reliance’ interest; that they were told x by the govt and based their future actions on x continuing. The problem with that reliance argument is it’s a political policy decision based upon claimed ‘discretion’ by an admin of a particular philosophy. Another election and a new admin might sweep in a new admin with an entirely different philosophy. A new Congress might eliminate discretion entirely or severely curtail it.
The legal issues will eat up a few years of the new admin before final ruling is made. This fact is another aspect of how the d/prog utilize the system to their advantage. Let’s say DJT is elected in 2024. A final ruling wouldn’t likely occur until the last year of his term if then. The d/prog know that and will try to run out the clock to force the final decision into being delayed for 5-8 years. Thus requiring not one presidential victory but two and possibly three.
Dropping a case is one thing. Offering prosecutorial discretion sounds like another i.e. an agreement signed off by a judge. Maybe with an automated pen, 1000 at a time, but still formally judge approved. Presumably the agreement would be “with prejudice” to put it in stone. That would really end it.
From the info in the article, it’s hard to tell how this works formally, and it makes a difference.
They are also losing cases on purpose or settling everything as a form of “reparations” with taxpayer dollars.
A country without borders is not a country.
A country whose government refuses to execute its laws faithfully is not a country.
A government that worries about enforcing foreign borders rather than its own should not be considered legitimate.
“Maybe it’s time Republicans took a page from their playbook and started gutting all the harmful, politicized, useless, and / or wasteful alphabet agencies GOP voters don’t like.”
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Indeed, in dreamland. Maybe DeSantis would do it. He had the cojones to organize the ending of Disney’s special governmental district within Florida. Trump talked a good game and made a few good appointments, but he didn’t end anything or cripple the opportunity for future expansion.
I wonder how many of the asylum claims are bogus. I guess a smaller percentage pre-Nov. 2020, because Trump was looking skeptically at them. But generally I have the impression that most of the asylum claims are bogus, and ending them would be better than pretending otherwise. I’m always looking for that silver lining …
It’s a bad look to dismiss all the cases under the former president but not under his own administration. A really bad look, almost like a reward for those who violated the law under Trump.