Thread: Immigration Court Backlogs Grow

Immigration Court Backlogs Grow

Posted: 06/ 8/11 09:45 AM ET

WASHINGTON -- Immigration courts are too slow to keep up with the high number of undocumented immigrants detected by enforcement agencies, despite a number of new judge hirings, according to a report released Tuesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

The government has spent the past seven years expanding its ability to detect people who are in the country without authorization, increasing the budgets for enforcement agencies by billions of dollars. But the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review, which hears all immigration cases, only grew by $100 million over the same period.

The result is large backlogs in immigration courts, keeping undocumented immigrants in removal proceedings in limbo and delaying justice for refugees and others who are eventually allowed to stay.

Although the Executive Office for Immigration Review recently hired 44 judges, the number of cases awaiting resolution were at an all-time high of 275,316 in May 2011, according to the report of government data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which is part of Syracuse University.

There's a high cost to delaying court dates, particularly if immigrants are kept in detention centers while awaiting trial. The average wait time was 482 days as of May, according to the report, at an average cost of $122 per day of detaining each individual.

In the 2011 fiscal year, the government spent $1.9 billion on immigrant detention centers.

The backlogs are due to lopsided priorities in Congress, said Eric Sigmon, director for advocacy at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services.

"We hear a lot of agreement on the Hill that the immigration court system needs more resources, but the appetite to ultimately support funding increases is not always there," he told HuffPost. "You're using a significant amount of taxpayer money to detain individuals who are waiting for a judge to hear their cases. If you had more judges and support staff, you would be able to speed up the process while ensuring judges have enough resources to review the cases.â€

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