Federal judges closed almost a million cases in fiscal year 2024, the highest number since 2015, when records began. The outgoing administration is warming up the engines of the great expulsion machinery that Donald Trump wants to set in motion when he returns to the White House on January 20. However, the huge backlog of cases could serve as a dam to the deportation plan that the president-elect intends to carry out. Some 3.5 million files are still pending review in the 71 federal courts in the country. These include 1.7 million cases in which asylum has been requested.
Fiscal year 2024 (from October 1, 2023 to September 30) was the busiest year for these courts, which responded to the executive branch, not the judiciary. The 700 immigration judges closed 914,000 cases, 36% more than in fiscal year 2023. There was an average of 58,000 cases closed monthly. May broke all records with 87,000 cases closed. Nearly 850,000 appeals in 2024 involved deportation orders.
Most cases were processed in Miami (47,000), followed by New York (45,000), Orlando (36,000), Chicago (32,000) and Dallas (29,000). The highest rate of removal orders was registered in Montana and the lowest in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the country.
In November, 2,042 immigrants were granted asylum and about 800 were denied this protection after arguing their case before a judge. Nearly four out of 10 cases that these judges reached resulted in a deportation order.
An analysis by Syracuse University (New York) indicates that, if the trend continues, fiscal year 2025 will break records for decisions on deportation cases. So far this fiscal year (through November 2024), immigration judges had issued removal and voluntary departure orders in 45.4% of completed cases, totaling 64,553 deportation orders. The majority of these individuals had Mexican citizenship. The percentage exceeds the average for fiscal years 2023 and 2024, when it was around 39%.
However, removal orders do not guarantee that an immigrant will immediately leave U.S. soil: the Biden administration deported 271,000 people in fiscal year 2024, a figure lower than court decisions that point in this direction.
3.7 million cases pending in Immigration courts; judges seek to unionize
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