DEAD WRONG

ICE Barbie Accused of Trying to Deport Dead People to Hit Quotas

Government lawyers are trying to reopen old immigration cases for people who are no longer living.

Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is so desperate to boost its deportation numbers that it’s asking judges to revive cases that are decades old—including cases in which the person has died in the meantime. Since the 1970s, immigration judges have used a mechanism called “administrative closure” to ease deportation backlogs and prioritize more urgent cases. The cases aren’t dismissed, but they’re closed until further notice, allowing the immigrant to stay in the country and apply for other forms of relief. Now, government lawyers are asking judges to revive cases that were administratively closed 10 or even 20 years ago. The government lawyers, however, aren’t checking to see if the immigrants have been granted visas in the meantime—or if they’re even still alive. One lawyer received a notice for a client who had died six months earlier. In another case, the client was still alive but the original attorney in the case had died, leaving his daughter to contact her father’s old client. Attorneys told the Los Angeles Times that the government wasn’t doing its homework and was flooding immigration courts with motions to reopen cases in an effort to meet deportation quotas.