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In the last year of President Barack Obama’s administration, the backlog in the immigration courts was 516,000 cases. Now it is more than a million.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University nonprofit, says cases for immigrants wait an average of two years, but some judges are scheduling cases to be heard six years out.
The number of immigrants apprehended at the border — there were 550,000 in 2016 and about 810,000 thus far this year — has overwhelmed an already overtaxed system. Trump’s Justice Department has attempted to remedy things by, for example, decreeing a year ago that judges must complete 700 cases each year to earn a satisfactory performance rating.
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