Trump will have his days in court

To understand why President Donald Trump promises the impossible when he says he will dramatically ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants, look no further than the overwhelmed Immigration Court on Van Buren Street in downtown Chicago. The court is strained to the max already, its backlog of deportation cases growing, and the only way to pick up the pace, short of a huge infusion of taxpayers’ money, would be to deny people a fair day in court.

We’ll assume the president and his team believe in a fair day in court. Scaling up deportations across the country would be enormously expensive and — if the experience of Chicago’s Immigration Court is representative — often a big waste of time. The great majority of those pulled into the court are not the dangerous criminals he warned of in his campaign stump speech.

On January 25 Trump signed an executive order saying immigrants who had been merely charged with a crime could be deported, a break from the Obama administration policy of principally going after only immigrants convicted of felonies or at least three misdemeanours. The executive order says Trump intends to “expedite determinations of apprehended individuals’ claims of eligibility to remain in the US”. But as Dan Mihalopoulos and Mick Dumke reported in last Sunday’s Sun-Times, the caseload in Chicago’s US Immigration Court has already increased nearly fivefold, from fewer than 4,900 cases in 2007 to more than 23,000 as of August. The time required to resolve a case in the Chicago court, which serves Midwestern states, gets longer every year. It’s now an average of 966 days — more than two and a half years. There already are 400 cases on the docket for the year 2020.

If the number of new cases soars as dramatically as Trump would like, the wait time for a new case could be longer than it took the Cubs to win another World Series. Chicago, February 17.