 |
|
Campos, who came to the U.S. from El Salvador when he was 17 years old to escape the pressure he was under to join a violent gang, had been unable to find a lawyer. His hands trembled as he gripped documents he had brought along.
“I’m scared,” Campos said in Spanish. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Nor do most people involved in the immigration court at this moment.
Campos’s case is among more than 88,000 involving undocumented youths that are currently backlogged in the nation’s immigration courts, according to federal court data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
Even as the overall number of undocumented children entering the U.S. has dropped, this backlog has grown, TRAC reports. Together with a lack of legal representation for many of these youths, immigration courts have become increasingly chaotic, according to attorneys representing undocumented immigrants and the non-profit groups that seek to assist them.
|
|
|
|
