Government works to ease immigration case backlog

FALLS CHURCH, Va. — Inside the glass high-rise that houses the headquarters of the nation's immigration courts, the focus is on how to make the immensely strained system more efficient.

Grappling with an inherited backlog that has ballooned to 1 million deportation cases, a years-long wait for hearings and White House pressure, the Executive Office for Immigration Review is buying real estate for new courts, creating an online filing system, streamlining training and hiring judges.

And it still can’t keep up.

Its monthly caseload more than doubled last October, when it was 35,776. In October 2017, it was 15,045.

“We are working on what we can control and we’re trying to keep the momentum going,” said James McHenry, who leads the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

EOIR, as it's known, is the arm of the Justice Department that oversees deportation proceedings — whether immigrants are allowed stay in the U.S. or whether they are turned back to their countries. Unlike independent trial courts, immigration court judges and employees work under Attorney General William Barr.

President Donald Trump has railed against the country's immigration system, accusing asylum seekers who flee their home countries because of violence and poverty of trying to game the system. The court backlog existed long before Trump took office. But a crackdown on the Southwest border and illegal immigration plus a surge in asylum-seeking families from Central America have added more cases.