Under Trump, immigration courts are seeing best numbers since 2008

The U.S. government steadily built a backlog of 4 million cases in the immigration courts for 17 years.

Since President Trump took office, the government has cut that backlog by 115,000 cases.

Although the change is relatively small, it is symbolically huge, serving as a yardstick for how quickly the administration has solved the border chaos that plagued President Biden.

“This is the first time since 2008 that the backlog has actually decreased,” a senior official told The Washington Times. “It’s being driven almost entirely by border policies which have reduced new cases.”

Known as the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the immigration courts averaged more than 100,000 new cases a month over the last nine months of 2024 as illegal immigrants streamed into the U.S.

In February and March, the first two months fully under Mr. Trump, the number of new cases dropped below 30,000.

The result is breathing space for the judges, who completed roughly 60,000 cases each month, or double the intake rate.

“In other words, President Trump’s policies to secure the border have been an overwhelming success and helped stop an historic influx of illegal migrants,” Justice Department spokesman Gates McGavick said. “This has allowed EOIR to effectively address the large backlog of immigration cases that the prior administration’s policies created.”

Immigration courts are where unauthorized migrants can challenge their deportations or request bond to be released from immigration detention.

They get far less attention than the border and interior enforcement, but experts say they have long been a problem. Migrants knew their court dates wouldn’t be for years, meaning they could burrow into communities to live and work.

Some unauthorized migrants who crossed the border during the Biden years were given immigration court dates a decade in the future.

Although immigration enforcement has been controversial, the bipartisan consensus for years has been to add personnel to the immigration courts. Congress has added enough funding to increase the number of judges from about 250 a decade ago to about 700 now.

One outcome was about 60,000 completed cases monthly, up from about 12,000 in 2015.

That still wasn’t enough to keep up with the massive numbers of border crossers. In fiscal 2023, 1.2 million new cases were filed with the courts. That rose to 1.8 million last year. Judges completed only 527,000 cases in 2023 and 704,000 cases last year.

Now, with the flow of immigrants down, the judges are completing more than twice as many cases as they get.

“You’re now in a situation where the immigration court has reached stasis, where the bathtub is as full as it’s going to get, and as you start opening the drain, it’s going to drop,” said Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge now with the Center for Immigration Studies.

He said that means migrants make decisions faster. Those who deserve asylum can get on with their lives sooner and those whose cases are bogus can get deportation orders faster.

The faster those deportation orders come, the more likely the Department of Homeland Security is to carry out the deportation, Mr. Arthur said.

The Washington Times sought comment from immigration rights groups for this report.