The southern border crisis has taken up much of the national focus on immigration over the past three years, but the back end of the crisis, the nation’s immigration courts, have similar problems.
As the number of illegal immigrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border hit all-time highs in December, government data revealed that the state of the courts was also in the worst position in its history.
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Federally run immigration courts surpassed 3 million pending cases in November, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University in New York.
“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Chicago, the third largest city in the United States,” TRAC wrote in its latest report. “Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states.”
The backlog has grown by a million cases over the past year, an indication of just how many illegal immigrants the Biden administration has directed U.S. border officials to release into the country.
Cases soared over the summer, increasing by nearly 400,000 between July and September — making up 40% of the year’s new cases in just a quarter of the year.
But things took an even greater turn for the worse in October and November with the addition of more than 280,000 new cases.
The courts will likely be further affected by what is happening at the border this month. More than 10,000 immigrants have been arrested illegally entering the country daily in recent weeks, with the large majority of people being released into the country despite the Biden administration’s threats to deport immigrants who do not pursue admission through lawful pathways.
Just as troubling is the number of cases that each of the fewer than 700 immigration judges nationwide have been assigned. As more immigrants are added to the court docket, each judge’s caseload has increased to 4,500 pending cases per judge.
Although the Biden administration has hired more judges, they have not been able to keep up with the workload. Judges closed out fewer than 1,000 cases in fiscal 2023, which ended in September.
The backlog has grown six times its rate from 516,031 cases at the conclusion of the Obama administration.
Despite talking tough on illegal immigration, the Trump administration also released immigrants into the U.S., adding to the backlog and wrapping up at 1.29 million cases by December 2020.
The Washington-based Migration Policy Institute described the state of the courts as facing an “unprecedented crisis” in an in-depth report it published on the judicial system over the summer.
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“More judges alone are not the answer. Slow hiring, high turnover, and a lack of support staff have resulted in overwhelmed judges whose productivity has decreased as the backlog has grown,” MPI wrote in its analysis.
“Large numbers of cases are not in themselves the problem,” MPI continued. “The failing is the inability to address those cases expeditiously and ensure timely, quality decisions. Cases in which noncitizens seek asylum have been a growing proportion of [immigration judges] caseloads, now comprising 40 percent of the court system’s pending caseload, and these cases take considerably longer to resolve than others.”
