| Current Average Wait for an Immigration Court Hearing is Nearly Three Years |
| (21 Sep 2015)
Nearly a half million individual deportation cases (456,644) were pending before the judges in the nation's clearly overwhelmed Immigration Courts at the end of August, according to the very latest data from the U.S. Department of Justice.
The severity of the rapidly growing crisis was revealed last January, when the court issued thousands of letters notifying individuals that their cases would be delayed for nearly five years more -- until November 29, 2019.
Now, more th seven months since this initial wave of rescheduling notices was sent out, the situation has worsened, with the backlog of pending cases currently up 11.9 percent since the beginning of this fiscal year. Furthermore, it is about a third (32.7%) higher than it was at the beginning of fiscal year 2014. While the average individual has already been waiting 635 days, the projected total time from the date their case was filed until their hearing date is scheduled is now 1,071 days -- or just under three years (35.2 months). For over ten percent of the pending caseload, hearings are scheduled as far off as the period from November 29, 2019 to July 1, 2020. The total projected wait times for pending cases ranged from an average of 22 days at the San Francisco, California video hearing location and 24 days at the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center in Oklahoma all the way up to 2,371 days for Detroit, Michigan. Wait times by court hearing location are based on a groundbreaking analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University of new case-by-case records of scheduled hearing dates. For full details, including specifics for 136 hearing locations go to: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/405/TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/sponsor/ |
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