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In January, Sessions announced he will review a recent decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals and consider whether judges should have authority to close cases. He sought legal arguments from all sides as he considers the matter.
In a December speech, Sessions skewered the Obama administration for closing “nearly 200,000 pending immigration court cases without a final decision” over a five-year period. “We are completing, not closing, immigration cases”, he said.
About 542,000 cases were pending three weeks before Trump took office in January 2017, according to a Department of Justice estimate. Since then, the backlog has grown by another estimated 145,000 cases, a 27 percent increase.
In comparison, the Obama administration added an average of 41,000 cases to the backlog each year, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a New York-based research organization.
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