Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Greetings. The Immigration Court’s backlog keeps rising. As of the end of May 2018, the number of cases waiting decision reached an all-time high of 714,067. This compares with a court backlog of 542,411 cases at the end of January 2017 when President Trump assumed office. During his term the backlog has increased by almost a third (32%) with 171,656 more cases added.
The pace of court filings has not increased – indeed, case filings are running slightly behind that of last year at this time. What appears to be driving the burgeoning backlog is the lengthening time it now takes to schedule hearings and complete proceedings in the face of the court’s over-crowded dockets.
For example, cases that ultimately result in a removal order are taking 28 percent longer to process than last year – up from 392 days to an average of 501 days – from the date of the Notice to Appear (NTA) to the date of the decision. And compared with the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration, cases resulting in removal take an average of 42 percent longer.
Decisions granting asylum or another type of relief now take over twice as long as removal decisions. Relief decisions this year on average took 1,064 days – up 17 percent – from last year.
Wait times in Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Imperial (California), Denver, and Arlington (Virginia) now average over 1,400 days before an immigrant is even scheduled for a hearing on his or her case. At many hearing locations hearings are currently being scheduled beyond 2021 before an available slot on the docket is found.
To read the full report, including how long at each court hearing location current cases are waiting before their hearing is scheduled, go to:
http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/516/
In addition, many of TRAC’s free query tools – which track the court’s overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more – have now been updated through May 2018. 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 U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC’s ongoing efforts, go to:
http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl
David Burnham and Susan B. Long, co-directors
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
Syracuse University
Suite 360, Newhouse II
Syracuse, NY 13244-2100
315-443-3563
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Wow! The “One Man Supreme Court” is also a “One Man Wrecking Crew” trying his best to bring down the entire U.S. justice system with his remarkable mix of bias, ignorance, cruelty, political grandstanding, and just plain old incompetence. To my knowledge, he’s never run anything larger than a modest sized U.S. Attorney’s Office, and not everyone who worked with him then was enamored by the way he handled that job. In fact, he was so bad that members of his own party his own party helped block him from a U.S. District Judge position because of his perceived racial bias and lack of ability to deal fairly with minorities.
All of this while, the GOP Congress just sits back and “ho hums” about the mess they have created and allowed to fester in the DOJ and their lack of meaningful oversight over Sessions’s destructive, often dishonest, actions and gross mismanagement!
And, destroying the U.S. Immigration Courts is by no means the last or least of his efforts. According to Richard Morosi’s “banner headline top story” in today’s Los Angeles Times, Sessions & Co have so overloaded the U.S. District Courts along the border with non-violent misdemeanor immigration offenders that those courts 1) don’t have time for more serious offenders, major fraudsters, and other real criminals; and 2) are abandoning their values and independence to produce what one former senior prosecutor, Charles La Bella, termed “turnstyle justice” (“not what the federal courts were meant to do”). It’s so horrible that one long-time U.S. District Judge has already quit because he couldn’t take the wanton wastefulness, stupidity, and inhumanity of it all. You can check out Morosi’s full article here: http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=aec32f3c-e756-4d4a-acbc-f7e451bd9d87
In other words, Sessions is compromising the actual safety and security of the United States and threatening the integrity of our U.S. Court System to indulge his own racist, xenophobic desire to punish “regular folks, dishwashers, landscapers . . .people who are coming to pick fruit or find menial work to send money back home.”
At least the Chief U.S. District Judge trying to deal with this mess has included defense attorneys along with judges and prosecutors in his new “case management committee.” Compare that with the Immigration Courts, where Sessions, his DOJ politicos, and administrative bureaucrats in Falls Church manage the cases from afar, based solely on political and enforcement considerations. The U.S. Immigration Judges who actually hear the cases, the hard-working (largely pro bono) defense attorneys, and even the local ICE prosecutors are effectively “frozen out” of the system for setting priorities and managing cases. I’ll wager that there is no other court system in the United States that attempts to operate in this bone-headed and obviously counterproductive manner!
Under Sessions, more judges = more backlog! That militates against Congress throwing any more judges, money, and personnel into this mess until the Immigration Courts are removed from the DOJ, a long, long overdue move.
How do you build more backlog with more judges? First, by demoralizing and effectively forcing out some of the most experienced and fairest judges and replacing them with “newbies,” Sessions reduces judicial legal expertise, productivity, and independence, at least in the short run.
Second, by trashing the very promising “prosecutorial discretion” program undertaken by ICE prosecutors with the encouragement and cooperation of the Immigration Judges, he forces “low priority” cases into the court system at the expense of the more difficult and complex cases that then get pushed to the end of the line. Astoundingly, Sessions’s recent legally flawed “beat down” of “Administrative Closing” virtually guarantees that several hundred thousand low priority “closed” cases will be returned to the courts’ active dockets in the near future, thus artificially pushing the backlog beyond 1,000,000!
This is known as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling.” It started under Obama, but has accelerated dramatically under Sessions. This is essentially what is happening with Sessions’s irresponsible prosecution of minor misdemeanants over in the U.S. District Courts along the border.
Third, and this jumped out from the TRAC report, it now takes much longer to complete cases, particularly asylum case and other cases granting relief, because they are all contested by ICE and Sessions is actively trying to “jack” the law against respondents, particularly asylum applicants. A wise Attorney General actually committed to the job of justice for all in America and responsible use of taxpayer-funded resources would work cooperatively with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and Immigration Judges within existing precedents favorable to asylum applicants to encourage “pretrial” of the many well-documented, meritorious asylum cases and other cases for relief (like cancellation of removal) now unnecessarily clogging the dockets so that they could be granted relief on “short-block dockets” by Immigration Judges. In other cases, they could be closed and removed from the docket to pursue alternative forms of relief at USCIS. This would be a great way of attacking the backlog without running over anyone’s Due Process rights! But, that’s not what Sessions is interested in.
Not only are asylum cases becoming unnecessarily complex and time-consuming under Sessions, but his apparent plan to intentionally misconstrue U.S. asylum law to disadvantage bona fide applicants in favor of his restrictionist agenda and personal biases against asylum seekers, women, and Central Americans is almost sure to result in many “losers” for the Government in the Courts of Appeals. This, in turn, is likely to result in massive returns for “do-overs” — just as happened during the Due Process disaster than occurred following the “Ashcroft Purge” of the BIA in 2003!
PWS
06-08-18
