Immigration Courts Get New Priorities

The Trump administration has issued new guidelines to the overwhelmed US immigration courts in an attempt to use new case goals and priorities to make the backlog easier to cope with.

James McHenry, the Executive Office for Immigration Review director, has issued immigration judges with a new seven-page memo, which says courts should initially deal with cases that have law established deadlines and those cases involving immigrants held in immigration jail, with the intention to have at least 85 percent of the latter handled within the next two months. 85 percent of cases involving immigrants not currently being held in detention should be dealt with in the next 12 months, according to the memo.

At present, the backlog in the immigration system of the US stands at almost 660,000 cases, with around 34,000 immigrants detained. The result of the backlog is that many of those immigrants are spending years in jail waiting for their cases to be heard and resolved. The crackdown on illegal immigration, which has been a priority for President Donald Trump, has also seen the arrest of undocumented immigrants in the country increase by as much as 40 percent during his first year in the White House.

Trump has vowed to reduce the backlog and increase the immigration court system’s resources. In the memo, McHenry said that the case priority categories of the agency can be expanded and applied to new cases only in the future.