The recent spotlight on immigration enforcement has failed to address the biggest bottleneck in the system—immigration judges.
Right now, there are 300 immigration judges around the country. And they have a daunting 542,411 cases pending. At full speed, judges can complete about 200,000 cases a year, as well as about 65,000 bond hearings and motions. But it’s also likely another 285,000 cases will spring up on the docket in the meantime.
The last year the courts were able to decrease their backlog was 2006, according to data cruncher Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
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