Mark Metcalf<\/a> knows better. He calculates that 43 percent of asylum seekers with court orders to appear never showed up for their hearings in 2016.<\/p>\n\u201cAsylum seekers are primarily those who run from court and those who abscond from removal orders,\u201d Metcalf told FAIR. \u201cImmigration courts for years gamed failure-to-appear rates. As a judge, I knew their\u00a0figures were wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Exposing the manipulation game played by immigration enthusiasts using official court data, Metcalf explained:<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of calculating the failure-to-appear rate by taking the number of aliens free before trial who missed court out of all those who were free before trial, the courts pursued a different calculation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey took the number who skipped trial out of the much larger number of those who were free before trial plus those who were detained before trial. Including the detained (people who can\u2019t miss court) in an equation measuring failure-to-appear rates produced the desired effect. It enlarged the denominator, shrank the numerator and gamed this important metric.<\/p>\n
\u201cA much reduced \u2014 and less alarming \u2014 failure-to-appear rate resulted,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, says the research behind the Post essay was fundamentally flawed because it only covered cases where the asylum process and proceedings were started while a family was still in custody.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course they attended those hearings; they were in detention and had to go to them,\u201d Vaughn noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn half of the cases of parents with children seeking asylum, they aren\u2019t in detention for very long (roughly 14 days) and once they are released, they don\u2019t bother even filing an asylum application, much less go to a hearing,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
Vaughn characterized the Post op-ed as \u201ca desperate and dishonest attempt to counter the real life narrative.\u201d To wit:<\/p>\n
\u201cMost illegally arriving parents seeking asylum are doing so not because they actually were persecuted or have a genuine fear of return, but because that\u2019s what they have heard they should say that will get them released into the United States to live happily ever after, even without legal status.\u201d