No ‘day in court’: US deportation orders blindside some families

US - Carin, a 39-year-old subsistence farmer from Honduras, crossed the USMexico border with her two sons late last year. They had fled after her political organizing led to threats of violence, she said, and intended to claim asylum.

They were released on one condition: that they show up to immigration court when called.

Carin said she made sure to check the mailbox regularly at the apartment in Colorado where they were living. In February, the first official letter arrived.

It was not a court-hearing notice. It was a deportation order.

“I said: ‘Oh my God’ and just cried and cried and then my sons were crying because we were all so scared,” Carin said. She asked that her family’s surname not be used for fear of damaging their asylum claim.

Clerical errors and lack of notice are common in the U.S. immigration court system, say immigration lawyers and former judges. Clerks are juggling a backlog of more than 900,000 cases and rely on numerous people to log information based on quick interviews at the border.

For migrants, such problems can bring dire consequences: A missed hearing can lead to an “in absentia” deportation order, issued by a judge when a migrant fails to appear. Especially vulnerable are recently arrived families like Carin’s who are listed on the fast-track deportation docket, known colloquially as the “rocket docket.” The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency targeted about 2,000 people on this docket for arrest and deportation in recent operations, although only 18 family members were actually taken into custody.

Carin said she learned only after hiring a lawyer that her case file had errors. Court documents, which were reviewed by Reuters, indicated that she had been served with the court-hearing notice a day before the notice was even issued - an impossibility. Regardless, she said, she never received any notice. The US Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which adjudicates immigration cases, declined to comment. President Donald Trump’s administration has said that immigrants are abusing the asylum process to enter the US and then skip court proceedings, allowing many to live indefinitely in the country.

“The overwhelming majority of claims are rejected by the courts, but by that time, the alien has usually long since disappeared into our country,” Trump said in a speech last November. “They don’t care because they’re in the country and nobody knows where they are.”

Striving to speed up the cases and deportations of recently arrived families, most of them from Central America, the administration created the family-unit “rocket docket” last year in 10 U.S. immigration courts.

Of the about 64,000 cases filed on the docket, about 17,000 have been completed. Of those completed, more than 13,000 resulted in an in absentia removal order, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joseph Edlow told lawmakers on Thursday.

(Reuters)