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Members of the House Judiciary Committee met Thursday to hear testimony about making immigration courts independent of the Department of Justice as the system faces a historic backlog of nearly 1.6 million cases.
The panel's subcommittee on immigration heard testimony from immigration judges and leaders of national bar associations calling for reorganization of the country's immigration court system that many said is strained by an increasing caseload and political pressures.
With a rise of 140,000 cases just since October, the unprecedented backlog facing the system is only getting worse, according to data from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges and a former immigration judge, attributed the backlog, at least in part, to the oversight of the immigration courts system by the Department of Justice, an executive agency led by the attorney general, who is a political appointee.
Tsankov said this makes the country's immigration court's subject to political whims and can create whiplash for immigration cases when there's a transition between administrations with different immigration priorities.
"That ping-pong between one administration's priorities and another’s, reducing judicial effectiveness," Tsankov said. “Our inability to complete cases is a function of those shifting priorities.”
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