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Texas immigration courts have the highest backlog in the country after California, which has nearly 84,000 pending cases, according to an analysis of court records by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The delays in processing cases only escalated in 2014 when more than 67,000 unaccompanied Central American children and families flooded across the Texas border, many of them claiming to be escaping gang violence and asking for asylum. The Obama administration expedited their cases to reinforce a message abroad that immigrants here illegally wouldn't be able to stay. That set other cases back by years.
"The backlog already was really big, now just imagine having a missing judge," said Raed Gonzalez, an immigration attorney who said the majority of his cases have been reset to 2019.
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