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People ranging from asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico to unaccompanied children crossing the border on foot, to longtime undocumented residents with families stateside end up appearing in court, often without attorneys to help them parse the country’s byzantine laws.
In a process smacking of a zip code lottery, one judge in New York may grant nearly 95% of asylum petitions while colleagues in Atlanta almost universally deny similar requests, creating a patchwork of standards.
Such inconsistency drives a high appeal rate and clogs the system, experts say. In addition, judges under the Trump administration lost much of their power to press pause on low-priority proceedings so that they could focus on more urgent cases.
Amid these bureaucratic logjams, the case backlog has ballooned out of control nationwide in a matter of years, from just over 516,000 cases in fiscal year 2016 to more than 1.6m today, according to data collected by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac).
“Quarterly growth in the number of pending immigration court cases between October and December 2021 is the largest on record,” according to Trac.
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