Blame for Immigration Court Backlog Falls Mostly on ICE

Here are the key points from an op-ed I wrote that was published by the New York Daily News yesterday. (Read the whole thing here.)

When President-Elect Joe Biden takes office next month, his administration will inherit an Immigration Court backlog of nearly 1.3 million pending deportation cases — the largest in U.S. history and nearly 2.5 times higher than the last year of the Obama administration, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Data suggests that solving this crisis begins in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not in the courts.

In recent years, the number of cases in the court backlog has become a kind of barometric reading for the immigration enforcement system. Higher numbers of pending cases put increased pressure on immigration judges to hastily decide complex cases that often involve life and death decisions. The backlog also leaves immigrants in limbo for years, which may prevent them from obtaining legal status and may keep them separated from their families.

[See article for more detailed arguments involving data.]

All this powerfully argues that the immigration court backlog is not primarily caused by the judges or their proceedings, but by ICE indiscriminately throwing more and more deportation cases into the adjudication machinery. It is critically important that Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s pick for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, understands this.

If the Biden administration is serious about reducing the backlog of deportation cases that are currently overwhelming immigration judges, the fix is clear: curtail the number of new deportation cases filed by ICE.

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