DECEMBER 21, 2023
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JUDICIAL WATCH
Immigration Court Backlog Explodes to a Record 3 Mil, Judges Average 4,500 Cases
Besides crushing records for letting unparalleled amounts of illegal immigrants into the U.S., the Biden administration’s catastrophic open border policies are slamming the nation’s Immigration Court System with an unimaginable backlog not seen under any president. In November, the Immigration Court backlog exceeded 3 million pending cases, a shocking increase of around a million during a period of just 12 months. A new report issued this week by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University provides the ghastly figures taken straight from the government.
“Immigration Judges are swamped,” the report states, revealing that they average an inconceivable 4,500 pending cases each. “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 researchers write. “Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states.” The university data analysts found that previous administrations also failed to tackle the Immigration Court backlog but point out that this is in a class of its own because the “accelerating growth in the Court’s backlog has transformed the problem into an even more daunting challenge.”
During just the last quarter of fiscal year 2023—which runs from July to September—the backlog spiked by a remarkable 400,000 cases marking an average increase of 130,000 cases per month. Fiscal year 2024 started off with a bang as well with an even higher average of 140,000 cases a month during the first quarter of October to November, according to government figures provided in the document. As a point of comparison, at the end of Obama’s presidency the backlog stood at 516,031, which is around one-sixth of what it is now. At the time 278 immigration judges had an annual caseload of 1,850 and they completed an average of around 750 cases each year, TRAC reveals. Under Trump the number of judges grew to 484 and they had an average caseload of about 2,600 each.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/immigration-backlog-explodes/
