No more de facto amnesty: Trump cuts deportation court backlog for first time in almost 20 years

President Trump took the adage about finding yourself in a hole and stopping digging to heart — at least when it comes to illegal immigration, where his almost miraculous improvements at the southern border have resulted in the first sustained decrease in the immigration court backlog in nearly two decades.

In little more than six months, Mr. Trump has reversed the Biden years, when the government built the backlog to more than 4.2 million cases pending before immigration judges, and cut it down to 3.8 million as of July.

Some of that is better efficiency in the immigration courts, officially known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review, but “the real change has been the drop in new cases,” a senior Justice Department official said.

“That is entirely due to President Trump’s policies securing the border,” the official told The Washington Times. “It’s not a novel concept: enforcing the law, rather than ignoring it, really does work to reduce illegal immigration and the backlog.”

In 2024, under President Biden, the government averaged nearly 150,000 new cases each month, but judges completed fewer than 60,000, building the backlog.

Since January, though, the courts now averaged just 29,000 new cases each month and completed more than 65,000.

The EOIR data is another yardstick of Mr. Trump’s staggering impact on immigration and the decisions by would-be illegal immigrants, who, for the first time in modern history, just aren’t attempting to breach the border in any significant numbers.

Homeland Security said Border Patrol agents recorded just 116 arrests along the entire 1,954-mile southern border one day last month. In December 2023, at the peak of the Biden border surge, agents averaged more than 8,050 arrests per day.

Andrew “Art” Arthur, a former immigration judge, said being able to cut into the backlog is more than a brag-worthy statistic.

It means newcomers will get their cases heard sooner, and those with valid claims get full protections faster, while those with bogus cases can face consequences — namely, deportation. That message is reverberating back home, helping keep would-be migrants from even trying to make the trip.

Previously, the immigration backlog was so large that new arrivals were confident their cases wouldn’t be heard for years, giving them plenty of time to work and put down roots before the U.S. even considered booting them out.

Social media networks buzzed with stories of successful crossings, drawing more people to make the journey.

Now that’s all reversed, said Mr. Arthur, who is now with the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Now that the backlog has come down, [immigration judges] are in a better position to issue more decisions,” he said. “The system has credibility again.”

But Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, said the humanitarian cost of getting to this point has been high.

Under Mr. Trump’s border emergency, migrants are being blocked from entering, and those who do make it across are increasingly likely to face criminal prosecutions for illegal entry or reentry. And they never get a chance to ask for asylum, which means no immigration proceeding is opened, he said.

“People at the border are no longer able to present protection cases for asylum,” Mr. Orozco said.

The Trump administration has boosted its detention capacity, which Mr. Orozco said means illegal immigrants who used to be released to await their court dates often years in the future are now being held and put in front of judges in a matter of weeks.

Some of them are simply deciding not to even move forward with their cases now, Mr. Orozco said.

If Homeland Security is the “Law,” the immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, are the “Order” part of the equation, delivering the consequences to those in the country without authorization.

But unlike the criminal courts, where guilt or innocence is at stake, the immigration judges deal instead in admissibility, and the consequence isn’t prison but an order of deportation.

As the court backlog grew, it became a de facto amnesty for many illegal immigrants, who had court dates years into the future.

Toward the end of the Obama years, the backlog topped 750,000 cases. It doubled during Mr. Trump’s first term, topping 1.5 million. Mr. Biden saw things spiral out of control, with cases surging past 4 million.

There were 4,173,595 cases as of Jan. 20. That had dropped to 3,782,563 as of the end of July.

The drop comes even as the Justice Department faces jabs for firing some immigration judges brought on board during the Biden years.

But the senior department official said the backlog went down even with those judges being ousted.

And he wondered why EOIR would want to be forced to keep the judges who built the backlog in the first place.