 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
“This is an enormous problem that’s facing the country,” says Susan Long, co-director of TRAC and a professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse. “The system is not working well.”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Roughly 1.6 million people are caught up in an ever-expanding backlog in United States immigration court, according to new data tracking cases through December 2021. Those with open immigration cases must now wait for a decision determining their legal status for an average of 58 months—nearly five years.
Though the immigration court backlog has been getting longer for more than a decade, a deluge of new cases added between October and December 2021 significantly worsened wait times, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research institution at Syracuse University that obtained the figures through Freedom of Information Act requests. The backlog increased by nearly 140,000 during that period, the fastest growth on record and the direct result of an uptick in arrests by agencies housed under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
|
|
|
|
