America’s ICE Backwards Approach to Immigration

America’s ICE Backwards Approach to Immigration

Posted on Jun 29, 2009


AP photo / Khampha Bouaphanh

The U.S. has hired thousands of Border Patrol agents and prosecutors while adding only three immigration judges since 2006. The result is a clogged system that leaves immigrants and even U.S. citizens in prison limbo.

By Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera, CIR

This article is a collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting.


While the nation’s understaffed immigration courts strain under a backlog that has grown to more than 200,000 cases, thousands of new border agents have been hired and the number of government attorneys who argue for deportation has increased by 35 percent, pushing more cases onto an already overburdened system.

As a result, cases often take months if not years to complete, leading to more immigrants being held in a growing network of detention facilities and jails. On any given day there are more than 30,000 people in immigration lockup.

Since 2004, 184 trial attorneys have been added by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), bringing the number of lawyers to about 709 as of Feb. 18, according to records recently obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting through a Freedom of Information Act request. ICE, a bureau of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), arrests and detains persons suspected of being undocumented immigrants and deports those ordered removed from the country by an immigration judge.

The hiring of more border agents also contrasts sharply with the hiring of immigration judges who have struggled to keep up with the case backlog. While nearly 5,000 border agents were hired from 2006 to 2008—the number of Border Patrol agents is expected to reach 20,000 this year—there has been a net increase of only three judges from 2006 to June 26, 2009. The number of judges has fluctuated, mostly as a result of retirement, and now stands at 233 jurists, according to the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the Justice Department agency that oversees the nation’s 57 immigration courts.

The shortfall of judges has contributed to a backlog of cases that reached 201,212 as of April 30, a 19 percent increase since 2006, according to a recent report by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan data-analysis group at Syracuse University. The backlog has jumped 64 percent since a decade ago.

Of the 233 current judges, all but a handful regularly hear cases, which TRAC estimates will exceed 384,000 this year, up from about 354,000 cases last year. Looking at one week last year, TRAC found that each judge normally handled about 69 cases in that single week.

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