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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   29786 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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I've read this article a couple times trying to figure it out, and the answer is "somewhere between 10% and 95%." I'm only sort of joking; part of the problem is that the government doesn't report attendance, it reports completions:

“The government … does not report immigrants’ appearance rate,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, wrote in a July 2019 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. “Instead it reports a related figure called the ‘in absentia rate’ — the percentage of ‘completed’ cases closed each year because the person missed court. Because the penalty for missing court is an automatic deportation order, these cases are completed rapidly. As a result, that figure overemphasizes rapid deportations for missing court and leaves out the much larger number of cases that remain pending as the immigrant diligently appears for every hearing.”

He used the following example to illustrate his point: “To simplify, imagine 10 people are scheduled to appear in court one day and nine show up. The judge issues a deportation order for the person who missed court, then deals with the remaining cases, finishing one and ordering the other eight to return for another hearing. The appearance rate for that day is 90%. The in absentia rate is a mere 50% — one deportation order divided by two completed cases.”

But also the numbers overall seem bizarre and don't really explain much. Like for 2023, 30K approvals, 30K denials, and 130K "Other"? Which a footnote says "Other" was deactivated in 2019, so why is still so common? Lots of missing information here.

Edit: formatting

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