Gavel Grab

Just how clogged are the nation’s immigration courts? They face “the largest backlog of pending deportation and asylum cases in history,” the Houston Chronicle reports in an article drawing heavily on new information from a Syracuse University-based data research institute.

The backlog of cases nationwide reached an all time high of 228,421 in the first months of fiscal 2010, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), up 82 percent from a decade ago.

Immigrants’ wait for action has been pushed to an average of 439 days, with extremes for pending cases of an average 713 days in Los Angeles and 612 days in Boston immigration courts. Some other immigration courts are at the other end of the spectrum, however, with average waits of 75 days in Florence, Arizona and 82 days in Miami.

TRAC said the failure of the Bush and Obama administrations to fill judicial vacancies on the immigration courts was key to the increasing backlogs, and that one of six judicial positions is vacant.

A related article in Harvard Law Record gives an immigration attorney’s first-person account of delays in the immigration courts and is headlined, “U.S. Funds immigration cops, not courts: The justice system is too focused on punishing immigrants, rather than protecting their rights.”

Members of the American Bar Association recently voted in support of the idea of creating a new, independent immigration court system to replace the one that now is a part of the U.S. Justice Department. You can learn more by clicking on Gavel Grab.