(LibertySociety.com) – The current backlog of immigration court cases has surpassed 3.5 million, according to data from Syracuse University.
SU’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) detailed the significant increase in pending immigration cases as the Department of Homeland Security continues releasing tens of thousands of migrants into the United States every month.
According to Syracuse University Professor Austin Kocher, a fellow at the Immigration Lab, by the end of March, the number of cases pending before the immigration court stood at 3,524,051.
TRAC’s report noted that the backlog surpassed three million in November 2023, marking a new record of cases pending. One year earlier, the backlog was two million, meaning the pending cases increased by one million in just 12 months.
The report estimated that immigration judges each had a backlog of 4,500 cases.
To put the number into perspective, TRAC notes that the total number of migrants represented by the more than 3.5 million pending cases exceeded the population of Chicago, America’s third-largest city.
When Donald Trump took office on January 20, 2017, the number of pending cases before the immigration court was fewer than 570,000. By the time Trump left office four years later, the backlog had increased by about 500,000.
In the time Joe Biden has been in office, the backlog increased by more than two million.
According to an analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies, it isn’t just the number of cases that have increased under the Biden administration. The number of migrants who fail to appear in court for deportation hearings has also skyrocketed. In FY2023, a record of nearly 160,000 migrants failed to appear in court. This fiscal year, that number of no-shows is on track to surpass 170,000.
Andrew Arthur from the Center for Immigration Studies suggested that the Biden administration is not inclined to remove the migrants who skip their court hearings, which may explain why they don’t bother to show up.
According to federal data, immigration courts impose more deportation orders than approve asylum claims to allow migrants to remain in the country.
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