Ten months after President Trump took office, immigration courts remain backlogged, immigration judges are being fired and migrants aren’t showing up to court for fear of being arrested.
The administration has pushed through Congress record spending for immigration but most of it is going to enforcement operations and detention; little is being spent on the courts or free legal services.
And the remaining immigration judges are now faced with such large caseloads that an individual who petitioned for political asylum during the Biden era is waiting up to four years to get a hearing.
So says a new policy brief unveiled on Monday by the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute.
“The challenges of the immigration court system are longstanding; it is nothing new. But what is new is the level and speed at which that backload has accelerated,” said Doris Meissner, senior fellow and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at MPI and one of the coauthors of “Breaking the Cycle of Dysfunction a U.S. Immigration Courts.” The brief analyzes government data, documents challenges and proposes five broad solutions to abate the backlog of 3.8 million pending immigration cases and deal with future emergencies. Sixty-five percent of the pending cases involved political asylum applications.
Solutions include reassigning federal resources now earmarked for enforcement, allow asylum officers who aren’t judges or lawyers to adjudicate all new asylum cases, prioritize public safety or national security cases, integrate technology into courtrooms and ramp up legal resources for migrants.
