Migrants Migrating
Immigrants, goes without saying, must apply for asylum in court. However, many of them are now in legal problems without any plausible court dates and charging sheets, utterly unaware that they are passing their one year deadline to apply for it. Nearly 6 lakh migrants who crossed the U.S. border since March 2021 have been released into the United States without being charged or given any due date to appear in front of court.
Thousands of people have also been dropped off from the program that was supposed to track them all the time. This practise has been born because of a preceding necessity. Border crossing people have increased in number and has broken all past records. This was still a break from the previous rule of administering them which actually required migrants to be given charging documents with a court date by the Customs and Border Protection shortly after they were brought about.
Not having charging documents had left the migrants across the entire country in a pathetic loophole without a court date that could figure out and explicitly convey if at all they can legally stay in the U.S. Many have been living in constant fear and are unable to work. The immigration lawyers say that a lot of clients walk into their offices absolutely confused about what the next step is going to be to gain legal residence in the country.
South Border Issues
As the migrants cross the Southern border, a lot of criticism has come out regarding Biden’s border policies from both the parties. However, less focus has been given to how the administration is handling these migrants after they have crossed the border and the time in which the court system is supposed to put forth whether they can live here legally or not.
From March 2021, these undocumented migrants began to increase in number and started arriving at the southern border and that’s when CBP releases these migrants with a Notice to Report which said to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. But this has its own share of problems so in July 2021, ICE began something entirely new and came up with a program called the Parole Plus ATD. The program allowed migrants to be conventionally released without charging any documents while their whereabouts were tracked with ankle monitors, by checking in on an app or even telephonically.
Nonetheless, between March 2021 and January 2023, more than 8 lakh migrants were released on either Notices to Report or Parole Plus ATD and about 214,000 of them were issued with charging documents with court dates which clearly means that roughly 588,000 did not know when or where to report for their asylum hearings at all. The border agents in Rio Grande Valley were duly instructed to begin releasing migrants without court dates in March 2021, as border processing centers became incoherently overcrowded and unsuitable to quickly process children who had arrived alone.