[quote]We all know how bad the federal government is at controlling our border, but we face the same problem in the system set up to handle immigration cases. Many people do not realize that illegal aliens who are caught end up in immigration courts that are part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. These courts are presided over by administrative judges; they are not Article III federal courts.
On Thursday, as BP’s CEO was being pummeled on Capitol Hill, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law held a hearing of its own. Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge, was one of the witnesses, and he had some startling testimony that went completely unnoticed by the media (full disclosure: Mark and I worked together at the Justice Department).
Mark Metcalf’s research on the deceptive statistics released by the Justice Department is quite shocking. From 1996 to 2008, the U.S. allowed 1.8 million aliens (many of them here illegally) to remain free upon their promise to appear in court when their cases were scheduled to be heard, and 736,000 of them never showed up for their hearings. After 9/11, court evasion by illegal aliens exploded — from 2002 to 2006, over 50 percent of all aliens summoned to court disappeared.
Of course, you’d never know this from the numbers reported by the EOIR, because it masks the true numbers by manipulating its statistics. For example, in 2005 and 2006 EOIR reported to Congress that the “overall failureâ€