GOOD NEWS: The Trump Administration Is Seeking To Restart Thousands Of Administratively Closed Deportation Cases

The Trump administration has requested the restarting of thousands of deportation cases that immigration judges previously had suspended, according to statistics provided Wednesday by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees the immigration courts.

So far this fiscal year, attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement have sought the reactivation of nearly 8,000 deportation cases that had been administratively closed — meaning pushed off the court’s docket. The previous fiscal year, which included nearly four months of the Obama administration, there were nearly 8,400 such requests.

The pace of such requests is nearly double that of the last two years of the Obama administration, when there were 3,551 and 4,847 such requests, respectively. Judges generally grant requests to restart cases, experts say.

The data comes just a month after Attorney General Jeff Sessions restricted the ability of immigration judges to indefinitely suspend deportation cases, a practice he said “resulted in illegal aliens remaining indefinitely in the United States without any formal legal status.”

The Obama administration had made a push to suspend cases that were deemed a low priority, like those of undocumented immigrants who had ties to the country and had no serious criminal convictions, using prosecutorial discretion as the courts dealt with a major backlog. In all, more than 300,000 cases have been administratively closed.

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