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Federal immigration courts face a backlog of at least 800,000 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, not including another 300,000 closed cases that the Department of Justice has ordered to be reopened. Because immigration proceedings are considered civil, rather than criminal, the only immigration hearings being conducted as scheduled are for undocumented immigrants currently being detained in federal custody. Those hearings are considered priority cases in part because the government is paying for detainees’ housing and food—although government employees still won’t be paid in the meantime.
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