The federal agency responsible for processing and adjudicating immigrants cases, including claims of asylum-seekers, completed the second-most cases ever in fiscal 2019 but still has nearly 1 million cases pending in court.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is located within the Justice Department, said Thursday it completed 275,000 cases between Oct. 1, 2018, and Sept. 30. That number is the second-highest since the office was stood up in 1983 and approximately 80,000 more cases than were decided in fiscal 2018.
The number of cases waiting to be decided, including asylum-seekers who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, is about 1 million, though that varies between government and nongovernmental data. The EOIR reported 987,274 open cases as of Sept. 30.
However, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University, concluded more than 1,007,155 cases remained pending as of the end of August.
The number of open cases now is five times greater than the 186,099 cases in the system at the end of fiscal 2008, which has inflated every year over the past decade.
The immigration office said it was able to hear and decide more people over the past 12 months because it had more immigration judges on staff and expanded its court capacity.
“Our immigration courts are doing everything in their power to efficiently adjudicate immigration cases while respecting due process rights, but efficient adjudication alone cannot resolve the crisis at the border,” EOIR Director James McHenry said in a statement.
The EOIR received 444,000 new cases from the Department of Homeland Security in 2019, the biggest referral of cases in one single year.
The court had 442 immigration judges on staff as of Sept. 30.
