Putting TRAC to Work
Policy and Public Interest Groups
Center for Immigration Studies
October 31, 2018
Sessions Delivers on Immigration Judges Boosting the number of adjudicators is crucial to cutting the backlog By Andrew R. Arthur
	There are, simply put, too few judges (and complementary staff) to adequately do the job. With the swearing-in of 11 new IJs in June 2017, there are 326 so-called "adjudicator" IJs, including assistant chief IJs in the field who hear some cases. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, through May 2017, there were 598,943 pending cases in the nation's immigration courts. This means that there are approximately 1,837 pending cases per IJ. GAO determined that the average IJ completed 807 cases in FY 2015. Therefore, even if no new cases were filed, it would take the immigration courts more than two years to complete their pending cases. External Link
	Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University Copyright 2018