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The courts will be a major obstacle for President-elect Donald J. Trump and his plans to deport as many as three million immigrants he says have criminal records. Many of those deportations — at least hundreds of thousands — would have to be approved by immigration judges.
Mr. Trump has also said he intends to freeze federal hiring, which would prevent the courts from bringing on new judges and clerks, who are federal employees. Without significant new resources, the courts would probably slow Mr. Trump’s deportations to a stall.
On a visit to the immigration court in Denver four years ago, cases were moving briskly, but judges were starting to worry because hearing delays were reaching 18 months. Now in Denver, the court with the longest wait times in the country, most cases drag on more than five years, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group studying federal data, has found. In Arlington, by reputation one of the nation’s best-run courts, eight judges have more than 30,000 cases, with some scheduling hearings in 2022.
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