Immigration Court Backlog Reaches All-Time High; Why Our Immigration Courts Can't Handle the Child Immigrant Crisis

Millions of immigrants are waiting to enter the United States, and the situation has been made especially grave with the influx of young Central American children waiting to get a chance to reside in this country.

Thousands of children are coming from Central America and causing a huge backlog in the courts where reports judges have to hear 1,250 new cases a year.  

President Barack Obama and Congress are working through proposals that would hire more judges to help with the backlog of deportation hearings for these kids.

Part of the reason for the immigration court backlog, according to reports, is that the Department of Homeland Security added to the list of crimes that can lead to immigrants being deported.

The children who are arriving here are mainly crossing the border in south Texas, and have typically had wait times of many months or years in order for their case to be heard.

The Immigration Court system that handles unaccompanied minors flooding into the Unite States hasn't been a perfect system, according to reports, but hopes to cut those wait times and lessen the backlog.

A new policy being worked out in Washington, according to the Los Angeles Times, "will assign a greater proportion of the nation's 243 immigration judges to hear juvenile cases, either at the border or by video, and appoint new temporary judges to help handle a surge of at least 57,000 unaccompanied minors into the U.S., most of them from Central America, since Oct.1."

The LA Times report continues, "The number of cases already pending in the nation's 59 immigration courts - a caseload that has more than doubled in the last 15 years - and a long history of delays that can stretch as long as five years raise questions about whether federal officials will be able to make good on their pledge to speedily deport new immigrants not eligible to remain in the U.S."

On average, it takes more than a year to be heard. In fact, a total of 578 days are the standard for a case winding its way through the immigration court system. The backlog consists of some 366,758 pending cases, according to the LA Times, citing federal court records used by Syracuse University. 

In other parts of the country, especially the southwest, the problem is event worse, reports the Arizona Republic. 

"The wait has been even longer in Arizona, where it took an average of 656 days to get a hearing in the state's eight courts and detention centers. The backlog of pending deportation cases statewide was more than 15,000 at the end of June," they said.

"In Phoenix, where the backlog is almost 11,000 cases, it took an average of more than two years, or 808 days, to get a hearing, according to the most recent data analyzed by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse."