MIAMI — Eight months after crossing the Rio Grande into the United States, a couple in their 20s sat in an immigration court in Miami with their three young children.
Immigration courts are buckling under an unprecedented 3 million pending cases, most of them newly arrived asylum-seekers. The number of migrants trying to fight their deportation in front of U.S. judges has grown by 50% in less than a year. Judges, attorneys and migrant advocates worry that’s rendering an already strained system unworkable, as it often takes several years to grant asylum-seekers a new stable life and to deport those with no right to remain in the country. In Miami, with the largest backlog, so many migrants seek help navigating the complex legal system that Catholic Legal Services has had to pivot to teaching them how to self-petition and represent themselves before judges.
Immigration courts are buckling under an unprecedented 3 million pending cases, most of them newly arrived asylum-seekers. The number of migrants trying to fight their deportation in front of U.S. judges has grown by 50% in less than a year. Judges, attorneys and migrant advocates worry that’s rendering an already strained system unworkable, as it often takes several years to grant asylum-seekers a new stable life and to deport those with no right to remain in the country. In Miami, with the largest backlog, so many migrants seek help navigating the complex legal system that Catholic Legal Services has had to pivot to teaching them how to self-petition and represent themselves before judges.
Fueled by record-breaking increases in migrants who seek asylum after being apprehended for crossing the border illegally, the court backlog has grown by more than 1 million over the past fiscal year and it s now triple what it was in 2019, according to government data compiled by Syracuse University s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.