Study Finds Immigration Court Backlog Nearly Equals Size of Philadelphia’s Population; Biden Buries Immigration Courts in ‘avalanche’ with 1.6 Million Pending Cases Amid Border Crisis

Immigration court backlog nearly equals size of Philadelphia’s population, study finds:

The US immigration court backlog reached nearly 1.6 million cases last year, with cases climbing more rapidly between October and December, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration court data.
The backlog is almost equivalent to the size of Philadelphia’s population, the clearinghouse found in its latest study.

Immigration courts, which fall under the Justice Department and decide whether to deport immigrants, have been bogged down over the years as more cases are added to the docket than can be addressed at any given time.

“The immigration courts are in crisis and the time for small measures is over. The immigration court backlog can only be fixed by removing the immigration courts from the U.S. Department of Justice and creating an independent immigration court,” said Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, in a statement.

“DOJ has prioritized its law enforcement functions over the immigration courts. The result is bad management, under-budgeting, and a gigantic and growing case backlog,” she added. —>READ MORE HERE

Biden Buries immigration Courts in ‘avalanche’ With 1.6 Million Pending Cases Amid Border Crisis:

The number of immigration cases waiting to be decided in federal court has increased at a faster rate under the Biden administration than under any other president, according to a report published Tuesday by a nonpartisan research organization.

Nearly 1.6 million people have cases pending in the U.S. immigration court system, the most ever recorded in history, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an affiliate of Syracuse University in New York.

The dramatic increase means illegal immigrants will wait years before having their claims decided, and that is expected to grow worse as the southern border crisis intensifies.

Of the total number of backlogged cases, 305,427 cases were added to the docket since March 2021, when the number of noncitizens illegally crossing the southern border from Mexico surged to the highest levels ever seen. The onslaught of cases has buried the fewer than 500 immigration judges nationwide in an “avalanche.”

“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the United States,” Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at TRAC, said in a statement. —>READ MORE HERE

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