Immigration courts face huge backlog

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By Brad Heath, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The nation's immigration courts are now so clogged that nearly 90,000 people accused of being in the United States illegally waited at least two years for a judge to decide whether they must leave, one of the last bottlenecks in a push to more strictly enforce immigration laws. 

Their cases — identified by a USA TODAY review of the courts' dockets since 2003 — are emblematic of delays in the little-known court system that lawyers, lawmakers and others say is on the verge of being overwhelmed. Among them were 14,000 immigrants whose cases took more than five years to decide and a few that took more than a decade.

"It's an indication that they just don't have enough resources," says Kerri Sherlock Talbot of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Some immigration courts are now so backlogged that just putting a case on a judge's calendar can take more than a year, says Dana Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

"You could have a case that would take an hour (to hear). But I can't give you that hour of time for 14 months," Marks says.

In the most extreme cases, immigrants can remain locked up while their cases are delayed. More often, the backlogs leave them struggling to exist until they learn their fate, Marks and others say. 

The immigration courts, run by the Justice Department, have weathered years of criticism that their 224 judges are unable to handle a flood of increasingly-complicated cases. Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Eastwood acknowledges some long delays, but says that's often the result of unusual circumstances. She says the department has enough judges.

USA TODAY reviewed immigration court cases completed between 2003 and mid-2008, using a copy of the court system's docket obtained from the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review. That listing included only cases that have been resolved, making it impossible to determine how many more long-delayed cases might be pending.

Five-year delays were most common in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, but were far less common around busy border crossings such as San Diego and Tucson, according to the dockets.

Federal law requires the courts to deal swiftly with some cases, including requests for asylum and immigrants who are jailed while their cases are heard, Eastwood says. The department has no guidelines for how quickly the courts should handle other cases, she says.  continues here

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