The slow track
Federal immigration judges are working at a faster rate than ever before, completing some 172,180 cases between October 2022 and January 2023. That puts the court system on track to get through ~60% more cases in this fiscal year than it managed last year, and yet it’s still unlikely to put a meaningful dent in the backlog of pending immigration cases which remain at record levels.
Indeed, data from TRAC reveals how the US immigration court backlog has grown in the last decade, ballooning to more than 2 million cases as of the latest fiscal year, more than 6x the number that were pending just a decade ago.
Judgment year
Pinpointing why the backlog has grown so much is difficult, with a cocktail of factors spanning multiple governments. Increased border arrests and activity have certainly played a part, with a record 2.2 million arrests along the Mexican border last year, as have under-resourced courts — there are just 600 federal immigration-court judges in the entire country. Court closures during the pandemic only exacerbated the underlying issues.
The build-up means that a typical case now takes more than 4 years. Indeed, the backlog is so large that, even if each judge cleared 5 cases from the docket every single day (including weekends), the backlog would take nearly 2 years to clear… and that assumes no new cases get added.
