Former United States Attorney General John Ashcroft — who served in the George W. Bush administration — said a video by former Federal Immigration Judge Elliot M. Kaplan is something to which Congress should pay attention.
In the video — exclusively released by The Sentinel’s parent company Kansas Policy Institute — Kaplan reiterates many of the issues facing the immigration court system, as well as the reforms needed he discussed in previous interviews with The Sentinel.
“America needs insightful and critical discussion by the public and congress of the adjudication system for immigration matters in order to encourage reforms that improve and streamline it,” Ashcroft said in an email statement to The Sentinel. “We should welcome and promote comments from people like Judge Kaplan who were immersed in the system and had unobstructed visibility into it.”
Indeed, earlier this year Kaplan said the federal immigration system is “anarchy” and that the federal immigration system is far more broken than many realize.
Kaplan reiterated in the video he spent many years in the business world and has written for outlets such as RealClearPolitics.com and BigGovernment.com, was Unit Chief Immigration Judge in the U.S. Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review. Kaplan heard asylum, withholding of removal cases, and many other immigration cases. He wrote and issued decisions in hundreds of matters.
“Immigration laws have been neglected since 1951 when they were adopted by the United Nations Refugee Convention in a noble effort in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust,” Kaplan said in the video. “It was signed in Geneva and supplemented by the 1967 New York protocol. That was more than 56 years ago, and a lot has changed in our nation and the world.
“In 2007, the failure of our immigration system became so apparent that under the leadership of President George W. Bush, and in cooperation with the United States Senate and House, reform was attempted and passed the United States House of Representatives, but the Senate dealt a fatal blow when Democratic senators Reid and Obama voted against it, the system further eroded when then President [Barack] Obama began loosely enforcing immigration laws and encouraged illegal immigration, while at the same time building chain link enclosures for to temporarily hold children separated from their parents.”
Kaplan said that while former President Donald Trump somewhat succeeded in stemming the flow, the border is currently more porous than ever, leading to an overwhelming situation in the immigration courts.
“The border has been more porous than ever under Joe Biden’s presidency; currently, there are somewhere between 10 million and 17 million illegal immigrants in the United States supported by your tax dollars,” Kaplan said in the video “According to Traditional Access Records Clearing House (TRAC) in December 2022 there were approximately 1,565,966 identified immigrants, of which 787,882 were waiting for hearings before immigration courts and 778,084 were waiting for hearings before the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.”
2022 is the last year for which complete numbers are currently available, and Kaplan said in the video those numbers change daily.
Indeed, as the Sentinel previously reported, as of June 2 of this year, more than 1.1 million immigration cases are waiting to be heard.
“Among those millions are thousands of incarcerated, convicted drug users, transporters, sex traffickers, murderers and other criminals who continue to file appeals,” he said. “There are also an unknown number of immigrants who are denied asylum in the United States, immigration courts and after exhausting their appeals, remain in the United States illegally because a Biden administration returns very few to their countries of citizenship.”
Kaplan said in the video the issue is not the immigration judges, who are almost uniformly hard-working, but are heavily over-worked — and added the government often seeks to dismiss most cases.
“Our current administration has encouraged the Department of Homeland Security to dismiss cases,” he said. “More recently, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas encouraged DHS to dismiss all cases prior to November 2020 even if the applicants had crime convictions, and the court only finds out that DHS is going to dismiss on the court date and after staff and judges have spent hours preparing for hearings, DHS currently dismisses between 40 and 60% of the claims, resulting in hours needlessly spent and implying that immigrants are seeing a judge and having their cases decided. The aliens, whose cases are dismissed, are in “nowhere land” with no path to citizenship or a green card, but are encouraged to apply to use this for a work authorization, which is believed to be automatically issued.”
As the Sentinel previously reported, Kaplan called on Congress to make changes, including moving the immigration courts — which are currently “administrative courts” under DHS under the federal judiciary, opening immigration court proceedings to the public and ending “birthright” citizenship, wherein children born of illegal immigrants are automatically granted U.S. citizenship.”
