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How much does JDV know about the asylum-seeking process? There's only certain situations that one can be granted asylum for (and that was narrowed recently by the Biden administration), and asylum-seekers are expected to appear in court and have a place to stay and in some cases are given ankle monitors to track their location.
The current backlog is, iirc, somewhere between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000 cases. There are approximately 700 immigration ALJs ("Administrative Law Judges") working on these cases. A year ago, when the backlog was only half as large, the wait-time for a hearing was nearly four years. This translates to effectively open immigration so long as you know to mouth the right platitudes, because what is the point of deporting someone after a decade?
Monitoring like this isn't all that common - as of March of this year, only 185,000 of the over 6,000,000 asylees were in this program, and possibly as few as 19,000 were given ankle monitors. And of course, being assigned to the program is no guarantee of compliance; people just cut the ankle monitors off, and the government cares more about retrieving the tech than it does tracking down the fugitive:
Many men with monitors “cut them loose and take off,” Maria said. “Better if I stay here and follow instructions to the end.”
Two former case workers with a GEO subsidiary, who spoke on condition that they not be named because they wanted to safeguard their chances for future government employment, said it was common for ankle monitors to be removed prematurely, and people who do so are rarely pursued. That’s consistent with the 2015 DHS inspector general’s report, which found that ICE lacked the resources to chase many who abscond.
“ICE has other priorities and most likely will not look for them,” said one of the former case workers, who worked in Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi. He said that if someone did flee, the priority was recovering their ankle monitor — not tracking down the person who abandoned it. “We would visit their house and knock on their door,” the former case worker said, “and at most try to look for the GPS unit.”
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Wasn't the entire process that largely started or at least hugely expanded under the Biden administration "show up at or across the border, say the shibboleth 'asylum', and we'll have you take a number for your court date. Conveniently that's years down the line due to the volume in cases, so we'll let you loose to show up then, and let you apply for am multi-year work permit once your case has been pending 150 days, but nobody is going to look at any details within that time anyway. Here's a list of government-funded NGOs that can provide for you during that time".
That's hardly "certain situations" and only very loosely "expected to appear." Charitably, it sounds like a well-meaning policy to help people fleeing oppression amid an overcrowded system, but I see why it's opponents characterize it as opening the floodgates and shrugging at the idea that any effort could be put into it.
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"In some cases" doing a lot of work here. I do not believe in the slightest that most asylum seekers that come to be in the US and get handed their court date are tracked at all.
The logistics of it are just not possible. You can't put a fresh hundred of thousand people a year under proper house arrest every year.
For comparison the total prison population of the entire United States is like 2 million people, only 32k of which are under CPB or ICE custody.
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