Report Offers Details About Immigration Court Backlog

As reported in Al Jazeera America: “The nation’s immigration courts got a bit of relief at the beginning of June, when the Department of Justice hired 18 new immigration judges. But the courts are still facing a major backlog.Illustration by Sam Ward for Al Jazeera America”
A new report by Bruce Wallace, writing for Al Jazeera America, details just how stalled the nation’s busiest immigration courts are, and how backlogged they remain. Writing from New York, he reports that “… depending on how you count it, this courthouse — actually a collection of 31 small courtrooms scattered across two floors of a tall federal office building in downtown Manhattan — is either the busiest or second busiest of the 58 immigration courts in the country. The one in Los Angeles got more new cases last year — a little over 18,000, compared with around 17,700 for Manhattan. But Manhattan has more cases pending: 60,538 compared with 51,878 in L.A. Or, on average, about 2,240 cases per New York judge. Judges in comparable courts have about 700 cases a year, according to the American Bar Association.