Trump's mass deportation plans could be hampered by record immigration court backlog

President Donald Trump has promised a massive wave of deportations under his administration, but attorneys, judges and others who are deeply embedded in U.S. immigration courts warn an influx of new cases could crush an already strained system. 

Within the first month of Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have already detained more than 10,000 immigrants.  

Some of those detained, such as those with criminal records or prior removal orders, can be immediately deported. But others will join the growing backlog of more than 3.5 million cases currently pending before immigration courts across the country, cases that can take years to resolve.

The backlog has left many immigrants in a state of legal limbo. Many of them have pending asylum applications, such as a woman NBC Bay Area is calling Maria, who says she fled here from Mexico two years ago with her young son after being extorted by local cartels.

“There were nights when I didn’t sleep at all,” said Maria, speaking in Spanish. “The emotional impact was so great that I preferred to save my son’s life. And that’s why we came here.”

Maria, who has a work permit and a driver’s license but not a green card, just had her legal limbo in the U.S. prolonged after her next asylum hearing was pushed out to the end of next year. Despite her pending case, Maria says the rhetoric from the White House has left her fearful to leave her house.

“I’m more afraid,” she said. “I’m even afraid to drive.”

Maria’s immigration attorney, Andrew Newcomb, says it’s common for asylum seekers to wait upwards of six years to get a ruling in their case. 

“There’s an enormous immigration backlog,” Newcomb said.

He said the president’s mass deportation plans could seriously add to those wait times and further strain an already overburdened system. 

“I know that a lot of nonprofits feel like they’re at capacity and they’re not able to really take on a lot of these cases,” Newcomb said.

With more than 400,000 open cases, California has the third largest backlog in the country, behind only Florida and Texas. The number of cases in the state has more than doubled in the last four years alone, with experts citing issues such as COVID and increased enforcement operations at the southern border.

There’s also been a massive influx of people seeking asylum over the past few years, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

Fiscal year 2024 saw more than 800,000 new asylum applications, up from about 200,000 a decade ago. 

“This concept of mass deportation seems not workable as a matter not just of cost, but a matter of logistics,” said retired U.S. immigration court judge James Fujimoto. 

Fujimoto says courts are notoriously understaffed and underfunded, with judges typically handling more than 4,000 cases at any given time. 

“If you really wanted to make it more effective you need to hire more support staff for judges because just adding judges isn’t going to work magic by itself,” Fujimoto said.

In fact, the backlog has only grown worse, even though the number of immigration court judges has nearly tripled and the number of immigration courtrooms across the country has nearly doubled over the past decade. 

A 2023 Congressional Research Office report found that even if 700 more judges were hired – roughly doubling the current number of judges – it would still take 10 years to clear the existing backlog. 

A bipartisan immigration reform bill, which included a plan to hire more judges, failed last summer after then candidate Trump urged Republicans in Congress to oppose it.

Fujimoto said shifting political winds are partly to blame for the increasing backlog since immigration courts are not independent. Instead, they are run by the U.S. Department of Justice, which he says makes them prone to constant rule changes and executive orders depending on who’s in power. 

“I find it hard to believe that you could fix this without some type of legislation,” Fujimoto said. “Otherwise, you just keep going back and forth. One party does this, ‘here’s my executive order.’ Another party comes in and says, ‘I’m canceling that.’”

Newcomb and others suggest dismissing cases for migrants without criminal records could help ease the burden on the courts. With the goal of focusing limited resources on more serious cases, it’s an option federal prosecutors and judges have traditionally had but was curtailed during Trump’s first term in office. 

“When you effectively tie the hands of prosecutors and you tie the hands of judges, what that causes is a traffic jam like we see every day.”

NBC Bay Area asked the Trump administration about how it planned to help clear the current case backlog in immigration courts across the country.

In response, the White House provided a statement, saying: “During his first term, [President Trump] cut red tape to reduce massive immigration backlogs, and he will leave no stone unturned in fulfilling his promise to restore order at our border, deport criminal aliens, and fully enforce long-ignored immigration laws.”

Maria has a routine immigration check-in with ICE scheduled later this year that she’s mandated to attend. Despite the protections of an ongoing asylum case and being represented by an attorney, she still fears what might happen when she shows up.

“Yes, it scares me,” she said. “I have to show up, because I didn’t come to steal, I didn’t come to kill, I didn’t come to do anything bad. On the contrary, quite the opposite.”