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Most judges have been furloughed and those who remain are working without pay. Lawyers have cancelled flights for out-of-town hearings and, absent direction from the Justice Department, continue to meet filing deadlines imposed by courts that aren’t open to accept them. Dozens of immigrants have shown up at courthouses every day, some unaware of the shutdown, many simply to prove that they didn’t intentionally skip their hearing.
With more than 76,000 pending cases as of November, Los Angeles already had the nation’s second-largest immigration court backlog, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Across the country, more than 800,000 cases were pending, a figure that has swollen from a low of less than 125,000 in 1999.
Every week of the shutdown added 20,000 cancellations to the backlog. By Jan. 11, more than 9,000 court cases were canceled in California alone.
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