TRAC Report: Ballooning Wait Times for Hearing Dates in Overworked Immigration Courts

TRAC, Sept. 21, 2015- "There were nearly a half million individual deportation cases (456,644) pending before the judges in the nation's clearly overwhelmed Immigration Courts at the end of August, according to the very latest information obtained from the U.S. Department of Justice and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). This backlog has been rising steadily for nearly a decade and has reached yet another new all-time high.

As a result, the average wait time for an individual in the Immigration Court's pending cases list has also reached an all-time high of 635 calendar days. But this average wait time only measures how long these individuals have already been waiting, not how much longer they will have to wait before their cases are resolved.

The severity of the rapidly growing crisis was revealed last January, when the court issued thousands of letters notifying individuals that their cases would be delayed for nearly five years more — until November 29, 2019. The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which operates these courts, explained that the move was needed to make room in its hearing schedule for higher priority cases due to the flood of unaccompanied minors and mothers with children who crossed the border last year. The EOIR was widely quoted as saying, however, that the 2019 date was just a temporary placeholder, and offered assurances that the majority of cases would "probably" soon be rescheduled to earlier dates.

It has now been more than seven months since this initial wave of rescheduling notices was issued and the situation is worsening; the backlog of pending cases is currently up 11.9 percent since the beginning of this fiscal year. Furthermore, it is about a third (32.7%) higher than it was at the beginning of fiscal year 2014 (see Figure 1).

As previously noted, there were 456,644 cases pending before the Immigration Courts at the end of August 2015. This means the court backlog has increased by more than 100,000 cases from the 344,230 that were pending at the beginning of FY 2014."