Throughout the last couple of decades, the number of new asylum applications in the U.S. had been steadily growing, showing significant spikes during Barack Obama’s and Donald Trump’s presidencies. Since President Joe Biden came to office in January 2021, however, the number of pending immigration cases has been showing explosive growth. According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, currently, there are 1.6 million pending immigration cases, which constitute the biggest backlog in U.S. history.
Since the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, 140,000 cases were added to the system, and if the same velocity persists, it is estimated that during the first quarter of 2022, 800,000 more immigration cases will be added, creating a new record again. President Biden’s promises to carry out comprehensive immigration reform and Covid-19-related restrictions further exacerbate the situation. It seems that the government’s attempts to tame the growing number of cases, like hiring new immigration judges to process the cases, has brought little results and cannot keep up with the pace.
Many other factors contribute to the problem’s root causes both inside and outside of the U.S., but one particular factor has recently drowned the legislators’ attention. Currently, immigration courts are part of the Department of Justice. Many immigration judges as well as the American Bar Association and the Federal Bar Association criticize the current system because immigration courts are mismanaged and judges lack independence and have to answer to the U.S. Attorney General, which can make their decisions politicized. To address the issue, it was proposed to get the immigration courts out from the Department of Justice’s umbrella and make them independent. If such legislation passed, the immigration courts would become self-managed without looking back at ever-changing administrations, and, as Mimi Tsankov, the president of the immigration judges’ union pointed out, independent courts “wouldn’t be having the goalposts changing on us every few years.” It is expected that the new system would help the court to process the backlog more efficiently. On January 20, 2022, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing considering the revision of the immigration court system. However, there is no timeline yet for the legislation to be unveiled.
Photo by Wesley Tingey
