The immigration court backlog is not a temporary crisis. It is the steady-state condition of a court system that was built without the capacity to handle the caseload it was given.
The Scale of the Problem
The immigration court backlog — the queue of pending cases awaiting adjudication in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — crossed into record territory through 2024. At the end of FY2024, EOIR had 3,558,995 pending cases, and a separate GAO count taken mid-year put the figure at nearly 3.5 million pending cases as of July 2024. The trajectory, not just the level, is the point: the backlog exceeded 1 million for the first time in FY2019, reached nearly 2.5 million at the end of FY2023, and was approximately 3.6 million at the end of FY2024. It has grown in nearly every year for close to two decades.
Wait times track the backlog's size, and they vary sharply by jurisdiction. As of early 2024, immigration court backlog wait times averaged around 1,424 days, or approximately 3.9 years, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That national average understates the experience in the most burdened courts: in San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Denver, and Arlington, cases now often wait over 1,400 days for hearings, while in New York City, wait times extend even further, into the early 2030s, for newly filed cases. A person filing a case today in a high-volume court can reasonably expect to wait somewhere between four and seven-plus years for a hearing — the low end close to the national average, the high end characteristic of the most congested dockets.
Why Capacity Additions Have Not Closed the Gap
The standard governance response has been to hire more judges, and EOIR has, in fact, hired at a historically unusual pace. The number of immigration judges on staff has nearly tripled over the last decade, from 254 at the end of FY2015 to 735 at the end of FY2024, with 437 new judges hired during the last five fiscal years and the number of EOIR's courtrooms increasing from 336 at the end of CY2015 to 642 in FY2024. And still: even as EOIR has hired more immigration judges, the backlog has continued to grow, reaching 3.6 million cases at the end of FY2024. Tripling the bench did not stop the queue from lengthening — it only kept the lengthening from being worse.
This is not a failure of will so much as a failure of scale. Congressional Research Service modeling of hiring scenarios found that even with hiring 100 additional immigration judges, the pending cases backlog would be expected to grow; only substantially larger investments — on the order of an additional 200 immigration judges, a scenario under which CRS estimated pending cases would decline to just under 1.1 million by FY2031 — begin to bend the curve downward. The actual hiring achieved over the past decade, while real, has landed closer to the scenarios that merely slow growth than to the scenarios that reverse it.
Meanwhile, the funding architecture on the enforcement side has moved in the opposite direction. From 2003 to 2024, the courts' budget failed to keep pace with increases in funding for ICE and Border Patrol that rapidly drove more cases into the court system, with ICE and Border Patrol receiving 24 times the total amount of funding compared to the courts over that period. Enforcement capacity and adjudication capacity were never built to the same scale, and every enforcement expansion since has widened rather than closed that gap.
The procedural responses have followed a similar pattern of addressing symptoms rather than the mismatch itself. Different administrations — including the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations — have attempted to reduce the backlog by implementing accelerated dockets for certain populations, a practice that has raised objections from some immigration judges and immigrant advocates. Structural alternatives have been proposed — moving the courts out from under the Department of Justice into an independent Article I system, for instance — but a range of policy options to address the pending case backlog have been proposed by EOIR and other executive branch agencies, Congress, immigration attorneys, immigration judges, and others without producing the kind of sustained, proportionate investment the underlying math requires.
A Structural Problem, Not a Cyclical One
The governance responses to the backlog have generally addressed symptoms rather than causes. Increasing enforcement generates more cases. Expanding immigration court capacity through additional judge hires improves on the current ratio without closing the gap between case generation and adjudication capacity, as the last decade's near-tripling of the bench demonstrates. Procedural reforms that streamline hearings reduce due process protections without a proportionate reduction in case complexity. The backlog is structural — it reflects a persistent mismatch between the volume of cases the enforcement system generates and the adjudication capacity of the court system — and structural problems require structural solutions that the political system has, so far, not sustained at the scale the arithmetic demands.
The immigration court backlog is the accumulated cost of decades of decisions to increase enforcement without proportionately increasing adjudication capacity. It is also the governance environment in which millions of people live out years of their lives — legally uncertain, unable to plan, and dependent on a system that is structurally incapable of resolving their cases on any timeline that corresponds to human life planning. That is a governance choice with human consequences.
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