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More than 420,000 cases are pending in U.S. immigration courts, a steadily growing backlog that immigration lawyers say they hope will be eased by the executive actions President Barack Obama announced Thursday.
By the end of October, there were 421,972 cases pending in the nation's 58 immigration courts—an increase of more than 22 percent from around the same time period in 2013, according to data released this week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The 60,941 pending cases in New York ranked third in the United States, behind California and Texas. However, the backlog increased only about 2.8 percent.
New York's immigration courts surpassed the national trend, increasing to 19,582 from 15,597, an increase of 25.4 percent.
Nationwide, the number of new removal orders filed against undocumented immigrants grew by 12 percent, from 198,723 in fiscal year 2013 to 222,956 this year.
The average time for closing a New York immigration case is 577 days, compared to 569 days for the entire country.
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