Washington— President Joe Biden’s attempt to efficiently deal with a new wave of migration following the end of the pandemic Title 42 restrictions has refocused attention on a severe shortage of judges, the result of long-standing neglect that has overwhelmed the immigration court system with a backlog of more than 2 million cases.
The court system is plagued by years of delays and low morale, as a workforce of some 650 judges struggles to keep up with the volume of immigration cases, leaving immigrants who have lived in the United States illegally for years in limbo. a long time.
The bottleneck shows how the challenges of dealing with an increase in immigration do not end at the southern border. Although scrutiny has focused on how Border Patrol agents will handle crowds of immigrants, public officials and immigration experts say increasing the number of immigration judges is crucial to reforming the system.
Biden has made some progress, hiring more than 200 judges since taking office, but he is still short of his campaign promise to double the number of immigration judges.
Some of the judges will work seven days a week for a while while the administration deals with the new increase, according to the Justice Department.
Eliza Klein, who left her post as an immigration judge in Chicago in April, said the latest spike in illegal border crossings will put pressure on the understaffed workforce as it prioritizes recent immigrants.
That will make some older cases languish further, he said.
“This is a great tragedy because it creates a second class of citizens,” Klein, who began working as an immigration judge in the Clinton administration, said of those immigrants who have been waiting years for their cases to be resolved. The oldest case adjudicated by Klein had been pending in court for 35 years, he said.
“It’s a shame,” Klein said. “My perspective, my thinking, is that we are not committed in this country to having a fair system.”
As throngs of migrants continued to seek refuge in the United States after Title 42 was lifted, US officials said the border remained relatively orderly. Still, about 10,000 people crossed the border on Thursday, a historically large number but one that dropped significantly to about 6,200 on Friday.
Tens of thousands of migrants continued to wait in makeshift camps on both sides of the border for a chance to apply for refuge in the United States. The administration continued to be concerned about overcrowding; Border Patrol had more than 24,000 migrants in custody Friday, well above the agency’s maximum capacity of about 20,000 at its holding facilities.
The backlog of immigration cases rose to 1 million in 2019 during the Trump administration, but has since risen to more than 2 million cases, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The average time to close an immigration case is about four years, according to the database. But some judges say they have cases pending for more than a decade.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said this week that the backlog was a “powerful example of a broken immigration system” as he called on Congress to pass an immigration reform bill.
In his 2023 budget request, Biden requested funding to hire 200 more judges. Congress appropriated funds for just 100 additional judges, for a total of 734 positions. The Government is still working to fill the spaces.
Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said that to truly address the backlog, the Biden administration would need to do more than just hire more judges. She said the government should increase funding for better technology and bigger legal teams, and that Congress should reform the nation’s immigration laws.
“I don’t think the United States has ever treated the award of any immigration benefit as a priority for its immigration policy,” said Cristóbal Ramón, an immigration consultant who has written for the Migration Policy Institute and the George W. Bush Institute.
Title 42 border restrictions, enacted by the Trump administration, allowed border agents to quickly turn away migrants without giving them a chance to apply for asylum, on the grounds that it would prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Now that the restrictions have been lifted, many migrants will be able to reapply for asylum by securing an appointment through an application or by crossing and convincing an immigration officer that they have a credible fear of persecution at home. In any case, they will probably wait years in the United States before obtaining a resolution in their case.
Typically, after migrants cross the border, they are questioned by an asylum officer to determine if they have a credible fear of persecution at home. After meeting the standard, many are released into the United States and wait years to be heard in court.
As president, Donald Trump mocked the US asylum program, calling migrants fleeing poverty and corruption part of a “scam” and a “hoax.” While seeking to curb illegal and legal immigration, Trump imposed a quota to complete 700 cases a year.
The union representing the nation’s immigration judges said the quota came at the expense of due process.
The union filed a labor complaint against Trump’s Justice Department after the agency’s executive office for immigration review sent court employees a link to a blog post from a white nationalist website. The post included anti-Semitic attacks on the judges.
Biden eliminated Trump-era quotas for immigration judges when he took office and in 2021 instituted a system to try to expedite the processing of asylum cases.
The Biden administration placed about 110,000 cases involving newcomers on a special docket, with the goal of finishing them within a year. About 83% of those cases were closed, but only 34% of immigrants found representation, according to the Syracuse database. Immigrants have the right to a lawyer, although the government is not required to pay for legal representation. Only 3,000 of the migrants were granted asylum.
Klein now fears that his former colleagues will once again be forced to rush through dozens of cases at once.
“You are being treated as if all you are doing is numbers. You’re only finishing a certain number of digits per day,” Klein said. “There has been a significant drop off in the ability to take pride in your work.”
