Immigration courts treat asylum seekers lackadaisically, incongruous to how our state and federal courts treat Americans and everyone else seeking a hearing.
In our legal system, if you don’t show up for court when you’re supposed to, a bench warrant is ordered for your arrest, be it a civil or a criminal case. If you don’t show up, you get arrested the next time that you are stopped for a speeding violation and the officer sees you have a warrant out for your arrest. But the same does not hold for “asylum” seekers. When they don’t show up for court for their mandatory hearings, nothing happens. No bench warrant, no process, nada, nothing. Oh, and before I forget to mention it, most asylum seekers - they don’t show up for their hearings. That is the dirty-little-secret that CNN likes to keep hidden in a dark corner.
“Recent data from Department of Homeland Security makes it clear – over 40,000 immigrants accused of illegal border crossings last year simply never appeared for their court proceedings,” U.S. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe wrote in a press release earlier this summer. And nothing happened to them. More strikingly, their information was never entered into police databases. They are somewhere amongst us right now. And, unlike the rest of us, who would be wanted by the police the second we miss our court dates, police will never know that these individuals failed to appear for their mandatory hearings.
Inhofe is seeking to change this discrepancy. He was joined by Ted Cruz, Mike Rounds, and John Kennedy last week in introducing a new bill to the Senate floor to help equalize the legal system, the WALL Act. The WALL Act targets explicitly the problem of asylum hearing no-shows with the all-American bench warrant concept. So if an “asylum seeker” is just an illegal immigrant who bailed on his court date and he is stopped for speeding, the police officer will see a warrant for violating immigration law and will be able to arrest him. This little legal tweak will create equitable treatment for all courtroom no-shows. If the WALL Act is not passed, U.S. courts will continue to treat asylum seekers better than American citizens.
President Trump has tacitly endorsed the WALL Act, Breitbart reports.
Will the WALL Act dissuade good people from trying to come into the country? No. Will it hold asylum seekers to standard American court standards? Yes. But will liberals still oppose this with all of their might? Yes.
I support the WALL Act; I support fairness.