U.S. Border Patrol encountered 1.7 million noncitizens between ports of entry in FY 2021, a 300% increase over FY 2020. This included approximately 451,000 apprehensions of family unit members.
To help deal with this increase, Border Patrol created two processes to release families (parents and children under 18) into the U.S. without initiating immigration removal proceedings. This reduced their time in Border Patrol custody. Border Patrol told the families to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to start their immigration court proceedings.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that as of March 1, 2022, about 75% of these family members had reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as required.
GAO says U.S. Border Patrol’s implementation of the Notice to Report (NTR) process created challenges for ICE. The agencies sought to address these challenges by developing the parole plus Alternatives to Detention (ATD) process.
In March 2021, Border Patrol initiated the NTR process quickly to reduce agents’ administrative processing times by releasing noncitizen family units (parents and children under 18) without Notices to Appear. However, ICE officials were concerned that family units were not reporting to field offices as required. Further, ICE had difficulty locating some of these individuals due to limited address information. Border Patrol released about 94,000 family unit members with an NTR before terminating this process in November 2021.
Border Patrol officials told GAO that they did not participate in any planning for the new NTR process, and also did not receive advance notice from headquarters before they were instructed to implement the NTR process. Specifically, officials in the Rio Grande Valley sector stated that they received guidance from headquarters on March 20, 2021, and began implementing the process the next day. Senior ICE officials told GAO that, if Border Patrol had given them the opportunity to provide input during the development of the NTR process, they would have recommended changes prior to its implementation.
In July and August 2021, Border Patrol and ICE developed and implemented a second process whereby agents release family units into the U.S. on humanitarian parole and enroll the heads of household in ICE’s ATD program (or, parole plus ATD). ATD uses case management and electronic monitoring to help ensure noncitizens comply with their release conditions, allowing ICE to better track those released without a Notice to Appear. From July 2021 through February 2022, Border Patrol released about 91,000 family unit members under parole plus ATD.
According to Border Patrol data reviewed by GAO, sectors began decreasing the frequency with which they used NTRs with the implementation of parole plus ATD in late summer 2021. During a three-month period when certain Border Patrol sectors had authorization to use both NTRs and parole plus ATD, the number of family unit members processed with NTRs decreased from about 33,000 in July 2021 to about 2,000 in September 2021. Border Patrol officials said that being able to transition from NTRs to parole plus ATD was dependent, in part, on the availability of ATD technologies at Border Patrol facilities.
In June, as well as finding that the number of individuals enrolled in ATD more than doubled between 2015 and 2020, GAO also discovered that during this period, ICE unenrolled most participants before their immigration proceedings concluded. ICE placed about half of unenrolled participants on monitoring outside of the ATD program and about a quarter absconded. In response to these findings, the Department of Homeland Security concurred with GAO’s recommendations to improve implementation, assessment, and oversight of the ATD program and its $2.2 billion contract, including that ICE establish performance goals that cover core program activities, improve external reporting of absconsion information,…