Database Tracks Immigration Court Crush

Just how overburdened are the nation’s immigration courts? A powerful new online tool lets anyone crunch government data to check the backlog of pending cases by court, state and nationality.

The range is vast. For instance, the sole case involving an immigrant from San Marino had been pending in the Newark court for 1,376 days, while nationally, 61,044 cases involving Mexicans had been pending for an average of 370 days — from 152 days on average in Connecticut to 575 days in California.

Over all, the statistical analysis, compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University, shows that pending cases reached an all-time high of 228,421 in the first two months of the 2010 fiscal year, which started on Oct. 1, 2009.

In New York City’s immigration court, where two dozen judges preside over a wide range of cases, 33,854 cases were pending — up 30 percent since the 2008 fiscal year, when 26,086 cases were pending.

By far the largest number of cases in New York’s backlog — more than 11,000 — involve Chinese nationals; the next largest group is Salvadorans, with 1,529 pending cases.

A year ago, Sarah M. Burr, assistant chief immigration judge in New York, complained that an already crushing caseload was being swamped with many who should not have been placed in deportation proceedings by the government in the first place.

While money for judges, clerks and free legal services is short, the Department of Homeland Security has been very well financed, she noted.

“They have tons of new lawyers who are raring to go, and now they’re just arresting lots of people and shoveling them into immigration court,” she said at a symposium on improving legal representation for immigrants.

On average, a case in New York has waited 434 days, close to the national average of 439 days, but considerably less time than in Los Angeles, where pending cases have been open for 713 days on average, a 30 percent increase since 2007.

“Even as the annual count of backlogged matters has continued to grow, an effort launched in the last years of the Bush administration to increase the number of specialized judges who process them appears to have made little progress in the first year of the Obama administration,” the clearinghouse noted in a report issued Friday. “Indeed, since TRAC’s last report on immigration court resources, the slow pace of hiring new judges has not kept up with judge turnover. Thus, between April of last year and now, the number of regular judges has actually declined — from 229 in 2009 to 227 in 2010.”

In response, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts, issued a letter describing its hiring initiative as the agency’s top priority this year. It is trying to hire 47 judges, including 28 newly allocated positions that bring the total number authorized to 280 from 252, the letter said.