Reports show that the immigration backlog has reached the highest it’s ever been. With the southern border being hit on all angles with illegal immigrants, the case number is rising every single day and it’s reached its highest amount yet, even with all hands on deck.
The backlog currently has 3 million immigration cases, as of November of this year. Judges are averaging about 4,500 pending immigration cases per judge, whereas previously they’ve averaged about 1,200 cases per judge. With such a high number, judges are unable to keep up with the amount of immigration cases coming across their desks.
This includes one million cases that were added in just the past year. On average there were about 130,000 cases coming in every single month. For comparison purposes, in September of 2016, they averaged 500,000 pending immigration cases. This means that in the past 7 years it has increased six fold, with the most recent years having the biggest impact on that number.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse in Syracuse University, or TRAC, stated, “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.’
Studies and reports do prove that the amount of immigration cases jumped during Trump’s administration. During the first three years of Biden’s administration the amount of judges hired increased greatly, as did the amount of cases that they were closing per judge. Even with the increase in judges, they’re still not able to keep up with the climb in immigration cases.
During both Obama and Trump’s administrations there were fewer judges with fewer cases closed per judge, due to less immigration cases overall. However, now in 2023, the cases have grown so high that even with the increase in work being done by judges, they’re unable to make a dent in their case numbers.
To put things into perspective as to how unmanageable these case numbers are, just recently Fox News’ Griff Jenkins spoke about Eagle Pass, Texas being overwhelmed with immigrants after 4,000 of them illegally crossed the border while they already had 4,000 in custody.
