President Trump’s 2020 budget request calls for not only securing the border, but supporting the overburdened immigration court system as well.
Every day, human traffic increases at the southwest border to the tune of more than 50,000 a month, according to Department of Homeland Security statistics. This massive migrant flow is overburdening the Executive Office of Immigration Review that is already operating at critical mass.
The EOIR is beyond backlogged. It is broken. There were close to 187,000 immigration cases pending in 2009. In the following 10 years, this more than quadrupled by 2019, with 820,000 pending cases. The EOIR only employs 414 immigration judges to adjudicate these 820,000 cases, almost 2,000 cases per judge. You may think the EOIR is just a bureaucratic nightmare under the overwhelmed DHS, but the EOIR is a part of the Department of Justice operating under delegated authority from the attorney general.
Trump’s budget request calls for $635 million for the EOIR alone, including “funding to hire an additional 100 immigration judge teams and expand both physical and virtual courtroom space to conduct administrative immigration hearings.” This funding is not only critical to make even the smallest dent in the hearing backlog, but to enhance the ability of immigration judges to conduct virtual hearings.
In December 2018, then-acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker discussed the increase in asylum claims, saying in “2009, the Department of Homeland Security reviewed more than 5,000 initial asylum screenings. Within seven years, that number had increased to 94,000. The number of these aliens placed in immigration court proceedings went from fewer than 4,000 to more than 73,000 by 2016—nearly a 19-fold increase.”
Furthermore, Whitaker said, “over the last five years, only 20 percent of aliens have been granted asylum after a hearing before an immigration judge.” The budget calls for funding more than the politicized wall, but for funding the critical areas within this overburdened immigration system.
I worked the southwest border for years as a Border Patrol agent. Then, for just as many years, I worked in the bogged down bureaucracy of Washington, within the ranks of DHS. The broken immigration system can be fixed, but not with constant partisan bombardment that each side is right and the other is wrong.
Sit in a room, talk to the “boots on the ground” working on our borders, then provide the much-needed funding to support these law enforcement and immigration officials desperately trying to fix the system from within.
Jason Piccolo (@DRJasonPiccolo) is a former Border Patrol agent, ICE special agent, and DHS supervisor. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and author of Unwavering: A Border Agent’s Journey from Hunter to Hunted.
