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While the government — under President Obama and now Trump — has been ramping up immigration enforcement and detention, it has not invested a parallel amount of money in expanding the immigration courts’ capacity to handle the cases. Spending on immigration courts increased only 74% from 2003-2015 while enforcement spending went up 105%. Trump’s 2018 budget would increase the total number of judicial positions, but it’s not clear if that will become law and for the moment the backlog of cases is continuing to grow.
At the end of September, the number of pending immigration cases stood at 516,031, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. By the end of May, that backlog had jumped to 598,943 cases, which have been pending for an average of 670 days each. New York City has the biggest backlog (78,670 cases), followed by Los Angeles (57,090).
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