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“For those people who have to wait for years, and years to have their cases decided, it essentially means they’re living their lives in limbo,” Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at TRAC, told Gothamist/WNYC. “It delays really basic things like being able to buy a house, getting involved in your kids’ school, and it really forces people to make all kinds of really challenging decisions.”
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“For those people who have to wait for years, and years to have their cases decided, it essentially means they’re living their lives in limbo,” Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at TRAC, told Gothamist/WNYC. “It delays really basic things like being able to buy a house, getting involved in your kids’ school, and it really forces people to make all kinds of really challenging decisions.”
This has been further exacerbated by the backlog of pending immigration cases, a longstanding issue that has also taken a backseat to the pandemic. In 2021 alone there are over 1.3 million pending cases across the country, with nearly 150 thousand in New York - making it the state with the third largest number of pending immigration cases, behind only Texas and California. While cases first started to mount in 2009, Kocher points to the Trump administration as a catalyst causing the system to become increasingly overwhelmed.
“It was really only under the Trump administration that that number has skyrocketed so much more,” Kocher said, noting the rise from 500-thousand cases to 1.3 million in the last few years. “But now it’s continued to grow and there doesn’t really seem to be a clear solution other than substantial immigration reform.”
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