Border Security Breeds Immigration Court Success

Mark Twain remarked, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”, but regardless, you must have some metric to measure performance. And the latest statistics from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) – the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts – reveal that the unprecedented level of security at the Southwest border is breeding success in those courts, where backlogs have fallen by more than 326,000 cases since January. 

The Border Miracle

As I recently reported, Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal migrants at the Southwest border dropped to their lowest level in recorded history in June: 6,072, in total, a roughly 93-percent decline compared to June 2024, but more impressively 45.5 percent fewer than the previous record low, three months into President Trump’s first term in April 2017. 

And it’s not just Border Patrol. In June, CBP officers at the agency’s Southwest border ports of entry recorded just 3,234 encounters, or 26.5 percent fewer than their prior low-water mark of 4,393 in March 2017. 

Lest you get too optimistic, note that CBP encounters at the U.S.-Mexico line rebounded by the middle of the first Trump administration before Covid-19 shut down nearly all international travel. In May 2019, Southwest border agents apprehended nearly 133,000 illegal migrants and CBP officers stopped more than 11,000 inadmissible travelers at the ports there. 

It’s possible that we may yet see a similar swing under Trump II, particularly if the latest order from Judge Randolph Moss of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia curbing the president’s migrant policies stands. 

But for now, all’s (reasonably) quiet on the Southwestern front, and that’s little short of a miracle given claims by the last administration and most in the media (the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc.) in the run-up to the 2024 elections that Congress had to act for the border to be secure.

Congress hasn’t changed the border laws, and yet here we are. 

The Immigration Court Backlog

Shortly after I left the immigration court bench, TRAC breathlessly reported: “The number of new cases awaiting resolution before the Immigration Courts climbed to a new all-time high of 445,607 as of the end of April 2015”.

Today, fewer than 450,000 cases in the immigration court backlog is an almost unthinkable dream. By FY 2020, the backlog had risen to 1.52 million pending cases – though even that figure has become a misty watercolor memory of the way the immigration courts were not so long ago.

By the end of FY 2024, the immigration court backlog stood at nearly 4 million cases, nine times what it had been just a decade before.

That’s because by the end of FY 2024, the immigration court backlog stood at nearly 4 million cases, nine times what it had been just a decade before. Why the increase?

The main driver was the millions of migrants Border Patrol agents and CBP officers encountered at the Southwest border under the last administration, who poured into the United States illegally as the then-president and his DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, ignored congress’s migrant-detention mandates.

Though those aliens were released, most (a point I’ll get to) were placed into removal proceedings before increasingly overworked immigration judges. If amnesty is your goal (and it was the express goal of Biden’s fellow partisans), crushing the courts is the best way to get there.

The Latest EOIR Statistics

Which brings me to the latest EOIR backlog statistics, captioned “Pending Cases, New Cases, and Total Completions – Last 12 Months”, which were released to no fanfare last week.

They reveal that the immigration court backlog grew to more than 4.1 million cases by Inauguration Day but has now fallen to just more than 3.8 million – a decline of 326,168 immigration court cases in just six months.

Because of the secure border, “initial receipts” – new cases filed by DHS with the immigration courts – dropped from a 12-month high of 120,500-plus in August 2024 to fewer than 30,000 in June.

That’s because the number of “initial receipts” – new cases filed by DHS with the immigration courts – dropped from a 12-month high of 120,500-plus in August 2024 to fewer than 30,000 in June (plainly thanks to the decline in CBP encounters), while case completions held steady at nearly 66,800 last month.

Simply put, when immigration judges complete more cases than they receive, their backlogs drop, though, to be fair, at this rate it would take 8 years, 7 months, and 6 days to get to the point where the backlog is gone, and judges are simply hearing new cases as they come in the door. 

Much more importantly, however, this is the first time since FY 2008 that immigration judges completed more cases than DHS filed, but that year the difference between receipts and completions was roughly 3,000 more cases out of 226,000 that were added to the docket—nothing like the backlog reduction in last six months. 

Put another way, the ratio of completions to receipts in June was 2.25 to 1, whereas in FY 2008 it was 1.013 to 1, and in FY 2006 (my first year as an immigration judge and the prior record) it was 1.11 to 1.

Challenges Still Ahead

Curbing my own enthusiasm, however, there are still major challenges ahead. 

While, as I noted, most aliens encountered by CBP under the Biden administration were simply placed into removal proceedings and released, 2.86 million inadmissible aliens were paroled in at the borders and the ports over the last four years and DHS filed immigration court charging documents for fewer than 1 million of them – leaving roughly 2 million more to go.

Then, there are roughly 700,000 other immigration court cases that the Biden administration either terminated, dismissed, or “administratively closed” in what the House Judiciary Committee termed a “quiet amnesty”. 

Most of those aliens are putatively still removable, and if the Trump administration is genuinely serious about immigration enforcement, their cases will be returned to the dockets from which they came. Some are likely criminals, and DHS will likely triage the worst of them if it undertakes such an effort.

More Immigration Judges on the Way – with a Caveat

Aside from this historic decline in the immigration courts’ dockets, the other good news is that those beleaguered immigration judges currently on the bench will be receiving new colleagues soon.

The recently passed H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, includes a whopping $3.3 billion for EOIR, though for reasons no one can explain, it also caps the total number of immigration judges at 800 (there are about 700 of them on the bench now).

More immigration judges will mean more case completions, but there’s no reason to wait until February 2034 to get the backlog down to zero. Congress should reconsider that cap at its earliest opportunity.

* * *

As critical as the secure border over the past six months has been to the credibility of our immigration system, this historic decline in the immigration court backlog is likely even more important. Enforcement is impossible absent consequences, and when immigration judges are too swamped to issue removal orders, there are few consequences for flouting our immigration laws.