HARLINGEN, Texas (Border Report) — The number of pending U.S. immigration cases is the highest in history.
Backlogged U.S. immigration cases exceeded 3 million in November, according to new data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, TRAC, of Syracuse University.
The number of cases increased by 1 million from November 2022 to November 2023, TRAC reports.
That is the most ever and is attributable to the thousands of migrants who entered the Southwest border in the spring seeking asylum prior to the lifting of Title 42 by the Biden administration.
“Immigration judges are swamped,” the TRAC report said.
“More judges and higher case closures per judge have still not been able to keep pace with the flow of incoming cases,” the report found.
Immigration judges, who are part of the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), now average 4,500 pending cases each.
There are a total of about 682 U.S. immigration judges nationwide now, which is a 145% increase from the 278 immigration judges in 2016, according to TRAC.
Each judge closed on average around 975 cases in Fiscal Year 2022, but it is not nearly enough to close the backlog, says Priscilla Orta, of Lawyer for Good Government.
“This is like, you know, a classic, I Love Lucy episode when they’re trying to catch the chocolates. It’s just not gonna happen. There’s not enough people,” says Orta, supervising attorney for the nonprofit’s Project Corazon, which is based in Brownsville and helps to provide free legal services for asylum seekers.
The increased backlog means the average wait time for asylum seekers is about five years for court proceedings to fully resolve; that is up from average wait times of three years at the start of 2022.
“For the immigrants themselves, it means many, many, many years of waiting,” Orta told Border Report on Thursday.
“Immigration simply reflects back to us the most extreme version of what’s going on in the country as a whole. So what’s going on in the country as a whole — as we see from Congress, to the Supreme Court — is that no one is taking government and good government seriously. Because if they were they would be in Congress right now trying to fix problems, not argue, points or or gain notoriety, they would be sitting down and saying, look, we got a problem. We got to fix it,” she said.
Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, said the recent increase in immigration cases are almost entirely due to recent asylum seekers who arrived at the border. He writes that the increase in backlogged cases is proof that migrants are being considered for asylum in the United States.
“If you believe that asylum seekers deserve an opportunity to have their cases heard, then these numbers might be a positive sign. More people will have at least a nominal opportunity to apply for asylum instead of being turned away outright at the border,” Kocher writes.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.