The extraordinary and unprecedented backlog of cases in the nation’s immigration courts is making it impossible for the courts to deliver fair and consistent results and is undermining the integrity of the entire removal system. During the Obama administration, the backlog of cases pending before the immigration courts grew substantially from nearly 200,000 cases to over 500,000 cases. Under President Trump, that backlog has ballooned to over 1.26 million cases. As a result, cases now take on average over 800 days to complete. In many jurisdictions, the wait time for a hearing exceeds four years. The bottleneck for the entire removal system caused by the court backlog, if not addressed quickly, presents a serious obstacle to the Biden administration’s goal of ensuring the fair and efficient processing of all removal cases.

The Biden administration should act immediately to substantially reduce the immigration court backlog. This memo proposes a systematic and efficient method for how the leadership of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) can identify and remove significant categories of non-priority cases from consideration on the court’s docket. By systematically removing such non-priority cases from the courts active docket, the Biden administration will be far more effective in implementing its new enforcement priorities and in ensuring just results in removal cases.