The U.S. immigration court system, administered by the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the DOJ, has more than 3.5 million pending cases as of early 2026. The average wait for a hearing has reached nearly four years in many courts. A person placed in removal proceedings today in a major metropolitan area may not receive a final hearing until 2029 or later. During that period, they typically remain in the United States — which creates incentives, accusations, and political dynamics that bear little relationship to the legal merits of individual cases.
How the Backlog Built
The backlog is the product of overlapping failures across administrations. The number of immigration judges has not kept pace with case volume. Hiring is slow — the process from selection to courtroom can take eighteen months — and the position suffers from high turnover. Policy choices compounded the problem: Obama-era prosecutorial discretion policies were reversed under Trump, flooding courts with previously deprioritized cases. Enforcement surges at the border generate thousands of new cases that flow into an already overwhelmed system.
"The backlog is not a mystery. It's the predictable result of years of under-investment in judicial capacity combined with policy choices that generate more cases than the system can handle."
Reform Proposals
The most straightforward fix — more judges — enjoys broad support but requires sustained appropriations Congress has not consistently provided. Expanding administrative asylum adjudication by trained officers rather than judges has been piloted with mixed results. Immigration restrictionists favor limiting court access through expanded expedited removal procedures. Critics argue that sacrifices due process to manage a capacity problem better addressed by investment. The backlog is not merely administrative inconvenience — multi-year waits create genuine justice problems as witnesses become unavailable, evidence deteriorates, and conditions in applicants' home countries change in ways that affect their cases.