RULE OF LAWLESSNESS: 31,725 Illegals From Terror Hotbeds Still On Loose. [archive]

A staggering 31,725 illegal immigrants from countries that aid and abet terrorist organizations received deportation orders from U.S. immigration courts from 2003 through 2015, but what became of them is anyone’s guess, finds a report by a former immigration judge at the behest of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Immigration court records are silent.

In fact, some 3,095 of these aliens fled their hearings, among them 338 people from Iran, Sudan, and Syria, nations the State Department declares state sponsors of terrorism.

Mark H. Metcalf, a former judge on the Miami Immigration Court, authored the report that documents how illegal aliens easily cross U.S. borders or enter on forged travel documents and, when ordered to court, ignore their court dates.

Federal law — 18 U.S.C. § 3146 — imposes penalties from one year to 15 years in prison for those who fail to show up for federal court proceedings. Yet those who dodge immigration court are treated much differently. They can literally abandon their cases without fear of incarceration or removal and, in turn, imperil national and domestic security. American immigration courts, in fact, have the highest failure to appear rate of any court-system in the nation.

From 1996 through 2015, just under 1 million people the U.S. alleged were present illegally or had forfeited their right to remain by committing crimes simply missed their court dates and became fugitives, most never to be seen again.

“Over the past 20 years, 37 percent of all aliens free pending their trials — 918,098 out of 2,498,375 — never showed for court,” Metcalf explains. “Courtrooms, like borders, are porous. On average, 46,000 people each year vanished from proceedings created specifically for those claiming persecution in the lands they called home.”