TRAC: Priority Cases Overwhelm Immigration Court's Capacity to Handle

TRAC, Sept. 15, 2016 - "The number of judges continue to prove insufficient to handle the growing backlog in the Immigration Courts. The problems are particularly acute for handling even priority cases like those involving unaccompanied children and women with children according to the latest court data updated through the end of August 2016 and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

The backlog of pending cases involving unaccompanied children reached 73,649 at the August 2016, while the backlog of cases involving women with children is even larger and rose to 83,949 last month. Together they now account for nearly one third (31%) of the court's overall backlog of a record 512,190 cases.

For more details, including the top ten states with the largest overall Immigration Court backlog, see this month's snapshot report at:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/snap_backlog/

For cumulative details through August 2016 of priority cases since July 2014 involving women with children see:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/mwc/

Many of TRAC's other free query tools - which track new DHS filings, the handling of juvenile cases and much more - have also been updated through August 2016. For an index to the full list of TRAC's immigration tools go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/

If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at:

http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm

or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook:

http://facebook.com/tracreports

TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to:

http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl"