Report from TRAC Finds Rapid Increase in Immigration Court Completions

A new report released today by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University finds that immigration court case completions have been rapidly increasing.

During the first eleven months of FY 2022. Immigration Judges have closed over 375,000 cases – a historical record. If the pace continues, closures should top more than 400,000 by the end of the fiscal year. This is nearly three times as many case closures as last year. It is also roughly 50 percent higher than the previous high in FY 2019 during the Trump administration. 

The pace of closures has also been accelerating month-by-month since October of 2021. During the past four months, monthly closures blew past 40,000 and topped 50,000 during May and June. If average closures during these past four months of 48,721 continue, this would represent an annualized rate approaching 600,000. See Figure 2.

Part of the explanation for these increased case dispositions is the increase in the number of Immigration Judges. At the end of FY 2019, there were reported to be 442 Immigration Judges. While the pace of judge hiring slowed somewhat during the pandemic, the Court started this fiscal year with 559 IJs – 26 percent more than before. But the increase in the number of judges alone does not begin to explain the rapid acceleration in case closures.

Read the rest of the report for the whole story here: https://trac.syr.edu/reports/695/.

– Austin Kocher