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Migrants get their day in court. If for some reason the appearance doesn’t happen—whether they miss it, their lawyer has a conflict or their translator doesn’t show—the case goes to the back of the line. People wait for months or years for another date. There is a backlog of more than 908,000 cases pending in federal immigration court.
Multiple hearings will follow. The final hearing and decision can take years. The national average wait time is about 727 days, though the average wait eclipses 1,100 days in San Antonio and 1,000 days in Imperial, Calif., according to government data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
In the meantime, most families will live in the U.S., many with work permits that allow them to legally hold a job while they wait for a final ruling.
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