The nation’s immigration court backlog, where judges decide whether migrants can remain in the United States or face deportation, now exceeds more than 3.5 million cases under President Joe Biden.
The data comes from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, detailing a massive uptick in the number of immigration cases now pending as Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) releases into the U.S. interior tens of thousands of migrants every few weeks.
“At the end of March 2024, 3,524,051 active cases were pending before the Immigration Court,” TRAC’s Austin Kocher writes.
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University
By the end of last year, as Breitbart News reported, the immigration court backlog had topped three million, TRAC noted:
A new record was reached in November. The Immigration Court backlog passed 3 million pending cases. Just 12 months ago, during November 2022, the backlog was 2 million. That means the case backlog has grown by a million cases in just the past 12 months. Immigration Judges are swamped. [Emphasis added]
Immigration Judges now average 4,500 pending cases each. If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Chicago, the third largest city in the United States. Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states. [Emphasis added]
This indicates that in just four months since then, about half a million deportation cases have been added to the immigration court backlog to reach over 3.5 million cases by the end of March.
For perspective, when former President Donald Trump took office in late January 2017, the immigration court backlog stood at fewer than 570,000 cases. When Trump left office in early 2021, the backlog had grown by about 500,000 cases to reach more than a million.
Since taking office, Biden has nearly tripled the immigration court backlog.
According to a recent analysis from Andrew Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies, the number of migrants failing to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings “is soaring — on track to exceed 170,000 in FY 2024, which would best last year’s record of nearly 160,000.”
“Those aliens may be under orders of removal, but the Biden administration has no inclination — let alone plans — to remove them,” Arthur writes. “Which is why so many aliens likely didn’t bother to appear.”
Federal data has long shown that migrants are more likely to be ordered deported from the U.S. than they are to be found to have had valid asylum claims to remain in the country.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
