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Underfunded and understaffed for years, the immigration courts are emerging as a major bottleneck for officials under pressure to quickly process and deport suspected illegal immigrants. The number of pending cases stood at more than 375,000 in June, with average processing times stretching for 520 days, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a project at Syracuse University that gathers and analyzes federal data.
Thousands of additional cases are expected to hit courts in coming months as people recently caught illegally crossing the border are funneled through the immigration system. From October to July, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended more than 220,000 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico along the southwest border, according to agency statistics.
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