Some 250,000 asylum appeals are pending across Germany, according to estimates from an association of administrative court judges. Nearly 13,500 are ongoing in the capital alone, part of a tenfold increase over the past year.

Stephan Groscurth, a spokesman for Berlin’s administrative court, said the appeals — filed by the growing number of migrants who have been denied protection or given less than they were seeking — make up two-thirds of court business. “This will paralyze us for years,” a judge told Der Tagesspiegel, a German daily based in Berlin.

The courts are the last bastion of hope for Amira Suleiman, 44. She has not seen her husband or 12-year-old son for two years — not since she fled to Germany from Syria, setting out from the Palestinian refugee camp at Yarmouk, a war-ravaged place in Syria that had once been their home.