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The five-week government shutdown caused the number of immigration cases waiting to be heard in court to grow by 10 percent after furloughed lawyers weren’t able to process cases.
An already massive case backlog grew from roughly 800,000 to 880,000 cases between Dec. 21 and Jan. 11, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. Close to 43,000 scheduled hearings were canceled during the time period while Justice Department lawyers were furloughed and could not hear cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the WSJ reported.
“It’s chaos on top of disaster,” said retired immigration judge and former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, Paul Wickham Schmidt. “It’s already a system bursting at the seams.”
Court closures result in roughly 20,000 canceled case hearings per week.
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