More immigration judges

Big backlogs in immigration courts are preventing immigrants from having the same right to a fair hearing within a reasonable time. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are having to wait for years, facing uncertainty about their futures.

Court backlogs are estimated to have increased 85% over the past five years, with wait times reaching an average of 562 days, according to federal data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. California has the second- longest wait time, 686 days.

This increase is a result of the Obama administration’s strong emphasis on immigration enforcement. This in turn has led to a reduction in resources for non-police activities—like the court system—and a significant increase in the number of deportations.

An example of this imbalance is immigration court in Los Angeles, where 29 judges are in charge of almost 45,500 cases. This means that their individual case loads are three times bigger than those of judges in other areas of the law.

This situation is unsustainable. It is unfair for all those people who are struggling not to be deported, from the one requesting political asylum to the legal resident convicted of a misdemeanor and the undocumented immigrant who does not want to be separated from his or her family.

It is necessary to balance priorities when it comes to immigration in order to give more resources to a system that does not have enough judges—and also, to implement comprehensive immigration reform that stops the wave of deportations that began several years ago.