A top Justice Department official told Congress Thursday that the number of pending cases before the nation’s immigration courts has nearly tripled between 2011 and 2015, even though the number of immigration judges has fallen slightly.
Juan Osuna, director of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), is in charge of the office that oversees the country’s immigration courts.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, he said immigration courts are facing the “tremendous challenge” of dealing with almost three times the backlog, at a time of a hiring freeze.
“At the end of FY 2015, EOIR’s immigration courts had 457,106 cases pending, marking an increase of more than 298,171 cases pending over the end of FY 2011,” he said in his prepared testimony. That’s an increase of almost 300,000 from the roughly 158,000 pending cases in 2011.
Osuna indicated that immigration courts are dealing with the situation by prioritizing the most dangerous immigrants.
“The cases of individuals whom DHS detains, including those who have been convicted of serious crimes, remain a priority for EOIR,” he said.
Osuna explained that immigration courts make decisions on whether to remove an illegal immigrant once the Department of Homeland Security files formal charging documents against that immigrant. But he said the surge of illegal immigration in 2014 put extra pressure on the courts.
“The 2014 border surge put unprecedented pressures on EOIR, and our agency responded by updating its practices and policies, which streamlined and strengthened the immigration court system,” he said. “EOIR is hiring immigration judges to increase the size of the immigration judge corps, thereby augmenting adjudicatory capacity and working to reduce the case backlog and wait times for those in proceedings.”
But he noted that hiring has only picked up a little bit in the last year. Before a hiring freeze hit in 2011, there were 273 immigration judges nationwide.
As of this month, there were just 257 judges, and that was after a recent wave of hiring that allowed 23 judges to be hired.
“Another two dozen immigration judge candidates are going through the final stages of the hiring process,” he said. “All of these new judges will greatly assist in reducing the pending caseload when they arrive in immigration courts over the coming months.”
