HOUSTON — In a cramped hallway in Houston's immigration court building, a toddler dressed in his pajamas slept soundly, sprawled out on a Spiderman blanket on his father's lap.

The wooden benches in a nearby courtroom were completely full, leaving a half-dozen immigrants and their attorneys to stand in the aisle.



As the hours ticked by, an elderly woman facing deportation to Mexico rested her head in her hands. It was more than three hours before the court called her case — one of more than 30 on a judge's calendar on a recent morning.

The scene is typical for Houston's immigration courts, which saw a roughly 40 percent increase in caseload from 2002 to 2007. The situation here is part of a nationwide problem, critics say.

Nationally, the number of immigration prosecutions has increased significantly in recent years. Immigration judges received more than 334,000 matters — including bonds, motions and removal proceedings — in 2007, up from roughly 290,000 in 2002.

Meanwhile, the number of immigration judges has remained flat, with 224 today compared with 225 in 2002.

Since 2002, the federal government has added one immigration judge in Texas, for a total of 23.

The federal government has acknowledged for years the need to employ more immigration judges, but the agency tasked with the hiring, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, has struggled with bureaucracy and budget constraints.

Last year, the Bush administration weathered a scandal over the politicizing of immigration judge appointments, which government auditors found had delayed the hiring process significantly in some cases.

David Burnham, who has studied the immigration court system extensively as co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse with Syracuse University, described EOIR as “an agency adriftâ€