The Obama administration is notifying thousands of immigrants awaiting court hearings that their cases have been pushed back nearly five years, the result of a fast-tracking of higher-priority cases related to the surge of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who came across the Southern border last year.
According to
The Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department has begun notifying employees in the immigration court system that non-priority cases were being cleared from the court docket until Nov. 29, 2019, evidently the result of mounting backlogs and delays across the U.S. immigration court system.
The Journal said that it was not yet clear how many people would be affected, but that it would easily be in the thousands and could reach as many as tens of thousands, according to people familiar with the situation.
Non-priority cases tend to be those immigrants who are not being held in detention, living freely, and do not have a specific pressing matter to be addressed by a judge, according to the Journal.
"This backlog has existed for years, and Congress just doesn't make it a priority," Greg Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a nonpartisan group, told the Journal.
Chen said that the delay is not surprising given that the court was already overloaded before the recent surge of illegal immigrants.
According to the Journal, there are about 230 immigration judges in the country, handling more than 375,000 cases. The average time to resolve a case is nearly 600 days.
Immigration courts are directly overseen by the Justice Department.
Lauren Alder Reid, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the Justice Department, said that the rescheduling of the cases was the natural outcome of the Obama administration's decision last summer to prioritize cases of unaccompanied minors and other urgent cases.
"This is exactly what we said was going to happen," she told the Journal.
A number of people who work in the immigration court system told the Journal that there is some hope that the time line could move forward if priority cases are resolved more quickly.
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