Pending immigration cases have hit an all-time high at almost 500,000 this year, with only 273 immigration judges to handle the load, according to the
Washington Examiner.
The backlog increased by about 100,000 from two years ago, but since February of this year only 34 new judges have been appointed, meaning there are currently 1,819 cases per judge.
This has caused massive delays. Even priority cases like those involving unaccompanied children who entered the country illegally take almost two years, 672 days, to get to court. During that waiting period immigrants are allowed to remain in the country, and according to reports rarely show up for their court hearings.
The number of unaccompanied children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically over the past year, up from 15,616 in fiscal 2015 to 27,754 this year, according to the
Pew Research Center.
"This is astounding because wholesale arrival of unaccompanied minors and women bringing their children illegally across our borders is a relatively new phenomenon in the decades-old problem of illegal-border crossers," Dan Cadman, a former immigration official, said in a post for the
Center of Immigration Studies.
"It is one that has developed during the Obama administration because of lax policies that actually drive the flow because they force government agencies to act as the middle-men who complete the smuggling transaction of placing these minors and women with the families that engaged coyotes to smuggle them into the United States to begin with. And have no doubt, nearly 100 percent (if not indeed all) of these individuals get put into the hands of smuggling cartels — including the notorious, and notoriously violent, Los Zetas — to get them through Mexico and across the border," Cadman said.
The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security are working to secure the borders and determine what is causing the increase, but according to an unnamed DHS official speaking to
The Washington Post, "it's really, really hard to predict what's going to happen."
"We don't want a repeat of 2014," the official said. "Nobody likes to see young children and others sitting in Border Patrol stations because we have nowhere to release them to. Nobody wants to see that situation again."
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