U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it asked Congress for permission to execute “virtual” arrests of illegal immigrants to try to cut down on its backlog.
Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson told lawmakers on Tuesday that his agency is overwhelmed by the amount of work it has, and it needs to figure out ways to make formal arrests of the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who have been caught and released into the country over the last two years.
Those arrests are known as “Notices to Appear” or NTAs, and they are critical to beginning the formal deportation process.
“There is a request to the Hill to give us the authority that we can actually serve it virtually and agree to have people accept their documents electronically,” Mr. Johnson said.
He didn’t say what, exactly, the process would look like, though he did mention at one point the possibility of virtual interviews.
He acknowledged that some parts of the immigration enforcement process, such as collecting fingerprints, will still need to be done in person, so if that wasn’t done at the border, it would still need to happen in the country’s interior.
Under normal procedures, illegal immigrants at the border are supposed to issue NTAs before they are released. But the numbers have been so large over the last two years that people were set free without that step.
The latest numbers show more than 800,000 people were caught and released without NTAs since March 2021.
ICE already has a backlog of 5.3 million people on its non-detained docket. Those are migrants who are in deportation proceedings but who are set free in the U.S. while they await the next step in their cases.
Thanks to the chaos of the southern border, that figure is quickly rising, by an average of 100,000 new cases per month so far this fiscal year.
Meanwhile, the immigration courts are backlogged, with some cases projected to take more than a decade to complete.
ICE did not respond to a request for more information on Mr. Johnson’s proposal.
Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge and ICE lawyer, said virtual arrests could help — if done right.
One hurdle could be having to prove that the virtual exchange took place. Short of an email receipt or recording of a video encounter, that could be tricky.
Congress could rewrite the policy to allow the sending to be enough proof for an immigration judge, but that would still require a cooperating administration to enforce that.
Perhaps a bigger issue is that those who are already avoiding checking in with ICE are unlikely to change their minds because of the virtual arrest option.
“All of this is going to be dependent on the cooperation of the foreign national, him or herself, to accept service of an electronic NTA,” said Mr. Arthur, who is now a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If they ignore the email and there’s no return receipt or they refuse to appear at a Zoom meeting, an online interview with ICE, they’re still going to be out there. And ICE officers, whether under this administration or a future one, are going to have to go out and get them.”
If the NTAs could be served, he said, many of the migrants would still fail to show up for their immigration court appearances. They would then be ordered removed in absentia, meaning that if they came across ICE’s radar they could be deported without new proceedings.
There are 1.2 million migrants defying deportation orders right now.
