The backlog for immigration has reportedly reached an all-time high. Even with all hands on deck, the number of cases involving illegal immigrants is increasing daily and has reached an all-time high due to the border region’s constant assault.
As of November of this year, there were 3 million immigration cases in the backlog. Currently, there are 4,500 pending immigration cases for every judge, up from 1,200 cases on average in the past. Judges are unable to handle the volume of immigration cases that come across their tables due to the excessive number.
One million new instances have been added in the last year alone. Approximately 130,000 cases were received each month on average. To put things in perspective, there were, on average, 500,000 pending immigration cases in September 2016. This indicates that it has climbed six times in the last seven years, with the most recent years having the largest influence on that figure.
“Previous administrations — all the way back through at least the George W. Bush administration — have failed when they tried to tackle the seemingly intractable problem of the Immigration Court ‘backlog.'” said TRAC, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Reports and studies do demonstrate that during Trump’s presidency, the number of immigration cases increased. Both the number of judges employed and the number of cases each judge closed rose significantly in the first three years of the Biden administration. The number of judges is rising, yet they are still unable to handle the growing number of immigration cases.
Because there were fewer immigration cases overall, there were fewer judges under both the Obama and Trump administrations, and each judge closed fewer cases. But as of 2023, the volume of cases has increased to the point where judges are unable to reduce the number of cases they handle, while working longer hours.
In order to put the sheer volume of these cases into perspective, Griff Jenkins of Fox News recently discussed how Eagle Pass, Texas, was overrun by immigrants when 4,000 of them entered the country illegally while there were already 4,000 people in detention.
