The backlog of cases in immigration courts in the United States surpassed three million pending cases last month, a historic record.
The three million pending cases reported in November include one million cases that were added in the previous 12 months, according to a report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC).
Each immigration judge currently has an average of 4,500 pending cases, TRAC reported.
“Previous administrations – at least since George W. Bush – have failed to address the issue of ‘backlog’ (of cases) in immigration courts. Recently, however, the accelerated growth of this backlog has turned the problem into an even more daunting challenge,” the TRAC report noted.
During the last quarter, from July to September, the backlog of cases increased by nearly 400,000, with an average increase of 130,000 cases per month, according to the report. The monthly growth was even greater in October and November, averaging 140,000 cases per month.
In comparison, the backlog of cases in September 2016 was 516,031 cases, about one-sixth of the current total, according to an analysis by TRAC. The 278 immigration judges at that time, during the last fiscal year of Barack Obama’s administration, completed an average of 750 cases per year, from an average of 1,850 cases assigned to each of them.
The number of new judges hired increased during the first three years of the Biden administration; there are now a total of 682 immigration judges hired. Each of them completed an average of 975 cases during the last fiscal year, a rate nearly one-third higher than seven years ago, during the last year of the Obama administration.
Despite the larger number of judges working and the number of cases completed, the courts are unable to keep up due to the number of cases received.
Source: Fox News