In a new must-read explainer, Washington Post’s Philip Bump reveals that many of the undocumented immigrants targeted by this weekend’s raids may be deported without having received due process, despite claims from the Trump administration that they have.
Bump cites a recent report from Syracuse University’s TRAC program, “which analyzes immigration-related data including the outcomes of hearings for family groups included in the expedited process. Of those with legal representation, 99.9 percent attended their initial hearings. Among those without legal representation, that figure fell to 81.6 percent. Those who don’t attend a hearing are flagged for deportation.” But currently, there is no legal requirement to provide notice of these hearings to the undocumented immigrants.
As Bump notes:
The deportation orders include people who missed court hearings — that they may not have known about.
Some of those slated for deportation have been targeted for not having attended required court hearings. In some cases, though, the immigrants may not have known they were supposed to.
That those targeted in these raids were part of the expedited process introduced last year is important. David Leopold, an immigration attorney who served as general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explained why in an email to The Washington Post:
“Of the group of immigrants with deportation orders there are serious due process concerns because they either didn’t get notice of the hearings or the hearings were held in absentia or were not held at all,” Leopold wrote. In other words, many of them “did not have their day in court.”
The entire piece is available here.