Immigration

Immigration Courts Add A Whopping One Million Cases To Backlog As Border Crisis Worsens

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The immigration court backlog increased by a whopping one million cases in a single year as the surge at the southern border continues, according to a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

The number of pending cases in U.S. immigration courts reached three million in November, marking a new record, TRAC, which analyzes data provided by the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), reported Monday. The backlog is expected to only worsen with the continued record flow of illegal immigration at the southern border.

Border Patrol recorded 12,000 encounters of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in a single day Monday, Fox News reported. Encounters of illegal migrants at the southern border topped 2 million in fiscal year 2023 and 2.2 million in fiscal year 2022, marking the highest year on record, according to federal data.

🚨HAPPENING NOW – Over +2,000 migrants are awaiting to be processed in Eagle Pass as massive groups of migrants continue to cross illegally here. Federal officials are completely overwhelmed by the migrant surge that is non-stop here. This also comes after CBP suspended… pic.twitter.com/OMlreaDt1N

— Jorge Ventura Media (@VenturaReport) December 18, 2023

“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.’ Recently, however, the accelerating growth in the Court’s backlog has transformed the problem into an even more daunting challenge,” TRAC said of its latest report.

Immigration judges now each have an average of 4,500 pending cases, according to TRAC.

“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states,” TRAC noted.