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It’s just been the trend that Congress has not appropriated enough money you know. They appropriate money for enforcement and don’t recognize that, well there is downstream processing required to have things happen, and they just haven’t been as sexy to budget for it so this is really just a longterm kind of problem,
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Dr. Susan Long is one of the founding members of Trac, a research initiative housed at Syracuse University. It stands for ‘Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse,’ first getting off the ground in 1989 as a way to aggregate data from federal agencies on their internal daily practices.
This is done mostly through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications, aiming to shine a light on operations, and make sense of what’s being done by whom and for who, from departments and agencies typically more opaque than transparent. Data is gathered, analyzed and turned into tools and deep-dive reports for the general public to discover and learn from.
A major component of the research conducted surrounds immigration. Dr Long said there are an estimated 3.7 million cases in immigration courts across the country. Trac data through October 2024 shows the backlog of pending cases from our nearest immigration court in Buffalo is 12,216. This is compared to the tallied 378,646 pending cases across the state.
“The increase in the backlog isn’t new, however. During the last four years, it’s increased by about 2.5 times, and if you go back to the prior Trump adminstration, look at how much it increased then — it’s about 2.5 times,” said Dr. Long.
“It’s just been the trend that Congress has not appropriated enough money you know. They appropriate money for enforcement and don’t recognize that, well there is downstream processing required to have things happen, and they just haven’t been as sexy to budget for it so this is really just a longterm kind of problem,” she added.
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