Immigration Court Backlog Tops 3 Million; Each Judge Assigned 4,500 Cases

Published Dec 18, 2023

A new record was reached in November. The Immigration Court backlog passed 3 million pending cases. Just 12 months ago, during November 2022, the backlog was 2 million. That means the case backlog has grown by a million cases in just the past 12 months.

Immigration Judges are swamped. Immigration Judges now average 4,500 pending cases each. If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states.

Previous administrations — all the way back through at least the George W. Bush administration — have failed when they tried to tackle the seemingly intractable problem of the Immigration Court "backlog."[1] Recently, however, the accelerating growth in the Court’s backlog has transformed the problem into an even more daunting challenge.

The accelerating pace of growth in the Court’s backlog is shown in Figure 1. Numbers for the chart are found in Appendix Table 1. During just the last quarter of July to September 2023, the backlog jumped by nearly 400,000 cases at an average increase of 130,000 cases per month. During October and November 2023, the monthly growth was even higher at an average of 140,000 per month.

More Judges and Accelerated Completions Not Enough

A detailed analysis of case-by-case Court records obtained and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University revealed that at the end of September 2016, the final fiscal year of the Obama administration, the backlog stood at 516,031 cases, or roughly one-sixth of what it is now. The then 278 immigration judges completed an average of around 750 cases each year.[2] The average caseload assigned was 1,850 per judge.

The growth in the backlog accelerated during the Trump years. Compared to September 2016, the backlog grew two and a half times greater by September 2020 towards the end of the Trump administration. The number of judges on the bench had also grown to 484, and average pending caseloads were around 2,600 per judge.

Hiring of new judges accelerated during the first three years of the Biden administration. The EOIR’s latest personnel records show a total of 682 Immigration Judges now on the bench. In addition, each judge closed on average around 975 cases during the latest fiscal year. This is a closure rate nearly a third greater than seven years ago during the final year of the Obama administration. Even so, more judges and higher case closures per judge have still not been able to keep pace with the flow of incoming cases. Thus, average caseloads of the 682 judges now on the bench have jumped to 4,500 per judge.