Despite the Trump administration's hiring of more judges and other policies, caseloads of U.S. Immigration Court judges continue to grow — creating waits as long as four years for illegals to just schedule an asylum hearing, according to Syracuse University data released Friday.
The average wait time for scheduling a hearing is 1,450 days, or more than four years, according to data complied by the university's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), and backlogs have grown steadily since President Donald Trump took office in 2017.
In analyzing per-case records, TRAC found that 542,411 cases were pending before immigration judges in the first year of President Trump's term.
But by Sept. 30, 2019, the backlog had grown to 1,023,767 "active" cases. The number, however, rises to 1,346,302 when cases that have not yet been scheduled are added.
The TRAC data also show that the year-over increases are growing.
For instance, the active backlog of cases rose 16% from January 2017 to the end of that fiscal year, and increased 22.1% more during fiscal 2018.
In fiscal 2019, the backlog jumped by another 33.3%.
"While many sources for this rise are outside the court's control," TRAC said in a statement, "policy decisions and practices by the Department of Justice, which oversees the Immigration Court, have significantly contributed to growing caseloads," including a decision to reopen previously closed cases.
Shortly after taking office, President Trump signed an executive order prioritizing illegals with pending criminal cases for deportation whether or not they had been found guilty.
The White House is now testing a program in El Paso, Texas, that would give migrants a decision on their asylum claims within 10 days, The Washington Post reports.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.