Visualized: Current Judicial Immigration Backlog

With the recent increase in I.C.E funding and enforcement the topic of immigration is top of mind for many American’s. Here we look at the breakdown of immigration cases, judges and possible timelines to clear the backlog.

We found that the asylum claims were 2/3’s of all 3,416,921 active pending cases cases in the Immigration Court backlog.

Next we looked at the number of judges, used the average time to adjudicate a case and the above number of case to help estimate how long it might take to work through the backlog. Each judge can work though 800 to 900 case per year.

However, we have to consider that new cases are constantly being added. Today’s, rate under Trump, is currently 554,031 new cases/year. Under current staffing the backlog never clears. With 2025 staffing (when other judges were brought in to help) it would take more than 30 years to clear. Increasing judges by 25% would clear the backlog in 23 years. Under current staffing, the backlog never clears.

We also considered what the backlog clearance might look like if we held the backlog to 2000 levels but left new asylum claims as is. In this case, and under current judicial staffing the backlog never clears.

We also looked at the current backlog but kept future inflows to 2000 levels of asylum claims. In this case the back log clear in 10 years under current staffing.

We also looked at what the clearance may have looked at if asylum claims were held to 2000 levels and go forward asylum claims were held to 2000 levels, basically eliminating the effect of the CBP One app asylum claims on the current backlog and ongoing cases, typically 15,000 defensive asylum applications/year. When we did this, under current judge staffing, the backlog would clear in 5 years.

But the above is informative only, it does not reflect today’s reality. So, we also looked at what the current backlog and clearance might look like with a more normal look at go forward asylum cases, using the year 2000 as a baseline for go forward asylum cases. In this scenario, with current judge staffing, the backlog clears in 10 years.