Immigration court backlog eases as Biden era wanes

The Biden administration is deporting migrants at a rapid pace. Federal judges closed almost a million cases in fiscal year 2024, the highest number since 2015, when records began. The outgoing administration is warming up the engines of the great expulsion machinery that Donald Trump wants to set in motion when he returns to the White House on January 20. However, the huge backlog of cases could serve as a dam to the deportation plan that the president-elect intends to carry out. Some 3.5 million files are still pending review in the 71 federal courts in the country. These include 1.7 million cases in which asylum has been requested.

Fiscal year 2024 (from October 1, 2023 to September 30) was the busiest year for these courts, which answer to the executive branch, not the judiciary. The 700 immigration judges closed 914,000 cases, 36% more than in fiscal year 2023. There was an average of 58,000 cases closed monthly. May broke all records with 87,000 cases closed. Nearly 850,000 appeals in 2024 involved deportation orders.

Most cases were processed in Miami (47,000), followed by New York (45,000), Orlando (36,000), Chicago (32,000) and Dallas (29,000). The highest rate of removal orders was registered in Montana and the lowest in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country.

In November, 2,042 immigrants were granted asylum and about 800 were denied this protection after arguing their case before a judge. Nearly four out of 10 cases that reach these judges result in a deportation order. An analysis by Syracuse University (New York) indicates that, if the trend continues, fiscal year 2025 will break records for decisions on deportation cases. So far this fiscal year (through November 2024), immigration judges had issued removal and voluntary departure orders in 45.4% of completed cases, totaling 64,553 deportation orders. The majority of these individuals had Mexican citizenship. The percentage exceeds the average for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, when it was around 39%.

However, removal orders do not guarantee that an immigrant will immediately leave U.S. soil: the Biden administration deported 271,000 people in fiscal year 2024, a figure lower than court decisions that point in this direction.

In some cases, it can take years to locate, prosecute and expel a person. This delay occurs even in high-profile cases, as recently happened with the Somali war criminal Yusuf Abdi Ali, 71. The U.S. government announced last week that it had finally put on a plane the man who was the commander of the 5th Brigade of the army in northwest Somalia from 1987 to 1988 under President Mohamed Siad Barre. In that position, Ali ordered a number of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial executions, the burning of several villages and the indiscriminate use of anti-personnel mines against civilians.

Ali, who was known to his victims as Colonel Tukeh (The Crow), had been living on the run since the 1990s, when Said Barre was overthrown. A Canadian television network identified him in 1992 when Ali was working as a security guard in Toronto. Canadian authorities deported him shortly after that, and the war criminal entered the United States in 1996, despite the fact that the country had banned him from entering. In 2019, Yusuf Abdi Ali was located once again: he was living in Virginia and working as a driver for Uber, where he had a rating of 4.89.

Figures analyzed by Syracuse University indicate that only 0.74% of FY 2025 new cases sought deportation orders based on any alleged criminal activity of the immigrant (other than illegal entry into the United States).

President-elect Trump has signaled that his mass deportation drive will begin with criminals or people with criminal records. This is nothing new. People in law enforcement custody are those who are most at risk of early deportation and are removed from the country more quickly. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had about 38,000 people under surveillance as of December 1. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, will seek to have Congress expand ICE’s budget so that it can keep about 100,000 people in custody.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition