Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the US, has welcomed 44 new immigration judges. The Justice Department says this is the biggest class of such judges in the history of the nation, taking place as the Trump administration continues to struggle to reunite immigrant families separated by the now-defunct zero-tolerance policy, which saw the number of immigration cases in line to be heard increase to unprecedented levels.
A court filing states that 400 immigrant minors remain apart from their families as their parents wait for a trial, 45 days after the deadline for them to be reunited by the US government, which was mandated by a federal judge. There is now a backlog of over 700,000 immigration cases, according to Syracuse University’s data-gathering research organization, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
In a welcoming ceremony in Virginia on Monday, Sessions said that with the newcomers added to existing judges, there are now more active immigration judges in the US than at any other time in its history. He continued that even more judges will be added to the roster by the end of 2018 to achieve the goal of an increase of 50% in such appointments since the beginning of the Trump administration.
The Justice Department received funding for as many as 100 new immigration judges in the 2018 fiscal year, with requests for funding for another 150 attorneys for the new fiscal year, starting next month.