Federal immigration authorities said Monday that their electronic databases were up and running again after they experienced a “catastrophic hardware failure” that had plagued their case management system for deportation cases.
In a prepared statement, the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review said it is still “continuing recovery efforts” for other applications, including e-Registration, an electronic registry for immigration attorneys.
Local immigration attorneys had warned the computer glitches were threatening to delay deportation cases, keep people locked up longer and drive up costs for their detention at taxpayer expense.
The bugs have been preventing court clerks from accessing court records and entering new ones in the system. They have also blocked them from making audio recordings of hearings. As a result, immigration attorneys said, people have had trouble getting information about their court cases.
“We are happy to announce that the data recovery team was able to recover the data and create new drives for those which had failed,” the EOIR said in a statement released Monday. “To date, we have not lost any data, and we are continuing to finalize restoration of those applications most critical to our internal and external stakeholders.”
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