Gothamist
By Joseph Gedeon
July 7, 2021
During the past year, some remote hearings took place, but only for people who were in detention. Now, non-detained people can have their day in immigration court at Broadway, Varick or Federal Plaza.
“My wife is inside and we’re waiting for the good news,” said Ismail Hossein, a Bangladeshi American who was standing outside Federal Plaza immigration court with his young daughter. “We applied for that last June, now it’s July so it’s been more than a year.”
Hossein’s wait hasn’t been that long, however, according to data compiled and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. TRAC found that, on average, people in New York state have been waiting 1,002 days for their cases to be called, which is above the national average of 938 days. This number has only continued to rise, with the average waiting time for an immigration case being 863 days, in 2020 and 696, in 2021.
“For those people who have to wait for years, and years to have their cases decided, it essentially means they’re living their lives in limbo,” Austin Kocher, an assistant professor at TRAC, told Gothamist/WNYC. “It delays really basic things like being able to buy a house, getting involved in your kids’ school, and it really forces people to make all kinds of really challenging decisions.”
This has been further exacerbated by the backlog of pending immigration cases, a longstanding issue that has also taken a backseat to the pandemic. In 2021 alone there are over 1.3 million pending cases across the country, with nearly 150 thousand in New York – making it the state with the third largest number of pending immigration cases, behind only Texas and California. While cases first started to mount in 2009, Kocher points to the Trump administration as a catalyst causing the system to become increasingly overwhelmed.
“It was really only under the Trump administration that that number has skyrocketed so much more,” Kocher said, noting the rise from 500-thousand cases to 1.3 million in the last few years. “But now it’s continued to grow and there doesn’t really seem to be a clear solution other than substantial immigration reform.”
Under current law, immigration courts fall under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, with judges hired by the sitting attorney general. So when Biden-appointee Merrick Garland announced in May that the courts would reopen on July 6th, the backlog landed on the desks of an estimated 500 immigration judges nationwide.
“Individuals that have waited to have their day in court, if their cases are reset, may have to go to the end of our dockets,” Judge Amiena Khan, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told Gothamist/WNYC. “For many judges in the New York courts, that could mean all the way out to December 2023.”
Some advocacy groups have pointed to a recent memorandum from the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor to the immigration courts, which followed an executive order from President Joe Biden and aims to address the backlog. And while advocates believe it will help in some situations, they say it is not a long-term solution.
“There are still decisions in place which impede immigration judges’ ability to manage their own dockets,” Evangeline Chan, director of the Immigration Law Project at Safe Horizon, an NYC-based victims services organization, told us. “We remain concerned about the balancing of due process and the courts’ need for expediency.”
Chan highlighted one case of a client that has been adjourned by the court six times over the last four years. Judge Khan agrees that this is an issue to be addressed, not just in New York City, but on the national level as well.
“The judges recognize the tasks that are before us,” Judge Khan said. “And as immigration judges, we will do as we have always done: rise to the occasion to work to better the process and the system.”
Joseph Gedeon reported this story for the Gothamist/WNYC’s Race & Justice Unit.