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One would expect with our border numbers crushing those from last year that, if it’s being driven primarily by asylum requests of Central American families, the dockets would swell even over last year’s numbers. That is simply not the case. There’s been a 370 percent increase in family units for the first half of this fiscal year compared with the first half of FY 2018. The one caveat is that the USCIS credible fear caseload data for February and March, the two busiest months, has not yet been published, but based on what we see for the first four months, it’s clear that credible fear cases are in no way increasing commensurate to the increase of family units coming in.
Furthermore, data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) also confirms this trend. In an analysis titled, “Newly Arriving Families Not Main Reason for Immigration Court’s Growing Backlog,” TRAC asserts, “Since September, about one out of every four newly initiated filings recorded by the Immigration Court have been designated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as ‘family unit’ cases.” That is just 41,488 out of 174,628 cases. And that number is really inflated because, as noted by TRAC, “each parent and each child are separately counted as “court cases” even though many are likely to be heard together and resolved as one family unit.” They conclude that “recent family arrivals” comprise “just 4 percent of the current court’s 855,807 case backlog” as of February 28.
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