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Since the partial government shutdown began last month, immigration court hearings have ground to halt, effectively cancelling a vast majority of scheduled appearances.
Those postponed hearings will be added to the immigration court system's already record-high backlog, which stood at more than 800,000 cases as of November 30, 2018, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). Because of the government shutdown, more recent data is not available, said Susan Long, a director at TRAC, in an email to CBS News.
As of last Friday, nearly 43,000 hearings had been cancelled since the shutdown began, according to TRAC. If the shutdown continues through all of January, 108,112 immigrants will have had their appearances cancelled. That number grows to 185,071 if the shutdown continues through March 1, according to TRAC.
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