US Officials Overwhelmed by Immigrant Flood at Border as Case Backlog Swells to Record Numbers

Groups of asylum-seeking illegal immigrants wait outside the Migrant Resource Center to receive food from the San Antonio Catholic Charities on Sept. 19, 2022 in San Antonio, Texas. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images)

Illegal immigrants are flooding across the U.S. border with Mexico in such numbers that federal immigration officials are being overwhelmed by the biggest-ever backlog of pending cases even though they’re being processed faster, according to new data obtained by a government watchdog group.

“Latest case-by-case court records through October 2022 reveal that Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 marked the largest number of individuals granted asylum in any year in the Immigration Court’s history. Grant rates averaged 46 percent, up from 36 percent in FY 2021,” according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

“Not only were more asylum applications granted by immigration judges than ever before, but many asylum cases moved through the system faster due to a variety of Biden administration initiatives, including the Dedicated Docket.

“In this program, families seeking asylum were given expedited proceedings and moved to the head of the line, in front of those waiting in the court’s existing 1,977,988 case backlog.”

The current backlog of unresolved immigration cases represents a 57 percent increase over the 1,262,765 cases that were outstanding at the end of President Donald Trump’s final year in office.

Using the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the Syracuse University-based TRAC regularly obtains and publishes mountains of official data about federal laws, regulations, and programs, especially at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The Biden administration’s Dedicated Docket program was announced by DOJ on May 28, 2021, as a way to “significantly decrease the amount of time it takes for migrants to have their cases adjudicated while still providing fair hearings for families seeking asylum at the border,” according to DHS.

“Families arriving at the border who are placed in immigration proceedings should have their cases decided in an orderly, efficient, and fair manner,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in the announcement.

“Families who have recently arrived should not languish in a multi-year backlog; today’s announcement is an important step for both justice and border security.”

But Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times: “Given the abysmal failure of the Biden administration to control illegal immigration, we have seen record-high border crossings, millions of ‘got-aways’ [illegal immigrants not caught by officials], drastically reduced deportation and a full-blown invasion at our southern border.

“The Biden administration has no plan to address this crisis and is rushing through asylum cases.

“The unfortunate reality is that many illegal immigrants have claimed illegitimate asylum status, and the Biden administration is corrupting the integrity of the asylum process by cynically exploiting a devalued definition of credible fear.”

In a separate report, TRAC concluded that its analyses of the Biden administration’s Dedicated Docket program “points to there being no quick fix for the country’s asylum backlog.

“With time and a substantial increase in resources—including more judges, asylum officers, support staff, publicly provided attorneys for asylum seekers and perhaps an independent Article I Immigration Court—the asylum process might become reasonably speedy without sacrificing fairness.

“But short of that, the evidence suggests that the United States can implement schemes to make asylum cases fast or make asylum cases fair, but not both.

“The country needs careful and independent monitoring of this administration’s growing initiatives to expedite asylum cases so the public can judge whether these initiatives live up to their goals and the claims being made as to their ’success.'”

In a related development, Heritage Foundation officials published the first-ever geofencing of where illegal immigrants are within the United States with assistance from federally funded nongovernment organizations (NGOs).

“The investigation confirmed that a host of NGOs are actively facilitating the Biden border crisis.

“Overflow from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is being transferred to these organizations so that Border Patrol avoids overcrowded facilities,” according to a Dec. 5 report from the Heritage Oversight Project and Border Security and Immigration Center.

NGOs “apply for, and receive, taxpayer money to provide processing and transportation services and infrastructure to facilitate the migration of illegal aliens into the interior of the country.”

“While the investigation was limited both in time and number of facilities, the results show that the national impacts of mass illegal immigration are extensive. Devices that were at these NGO facilities later appeared in all but one congressional district in the United States.”

“The investigation confirms that Biden border crisis affects all of America and that NGOs are playing a central role in the mass resettlement of illegal aliens in the United States. Worse, this flow of illegal immigration helps enable cartels to bring terrorists, criminals, and deadly drugs like fentanyl into the United States.”

Regarding illegal immigrants, Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), at a Heritage Foundation event on Dec. 13, said, “As soon as they cross over, they know they are going to be in Border Patrol custody a very short time and then Border Patrol calls one of these NGOs and the NGOs roll in on charter buses, they load the immigrants up and in most cases they take them to a facility.”

Gooden described one such facility he visited near SeaWorld in San Diego as a small Sheraton hotel, which was barricaded and fenced.

He said NGOs such as Catholic Charities that are actively involved in assisting the movement of illegal immigrants often use such hotels, which are essentially taken over by the government for the purpose.

“So everyone is profiting. What happens is these charter buses roll in and they process every one. They get their bag full of supplies that they may have brought on their journey or they have toiletries the NGOs give them,” Gooden said.

“They get a COVID test, then they get a room key, they stay one or two nights and then they meet with someone from the NGO and they are given a plane ticket, a bus ticket to whatever, to go wherever in the country they choose.

“We know this because we talked with a few of the people who would talk to us, but then we were asked to leave once they found out who we were.

“They were not honest about what they were doing, they said the hotel was closed for construction, it was closed for Covid. Our response was ‘If what you are doing is so noble, why are you lying about it?’”