The Executive Office for Immigration Reform (EOIR) — the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — has just published statistics on immigration judges’ performance through the end of the third quarter of FY 2026, in June. They show, at last, that the immigration court backlog has fallen below 3.5 million cases, as the number of aliens ordered removed in absentia when they failed to appear has soared. DHS could learn some lessons from its sister department, but you may be surprised to learn the extent to which Americans’ humanitarian instincts were exploited by so-called “asylum seekers” with an assist by the last administration.
The Immigration Court Backlog
To appreciate how impressive the latest decline in the backlog has been, it’s important to: (1) understand the factors that drive the backlog; and (2) take a look back at the recent past.
The immigration court “backlog” is shorthand for the number of unresolved cases pending before the nation’s 715 permanent and temporary immigration judges (IJs), and it rises when the number of new removal cases filed (“initial receipts”) exceeds the number of old removal cases completed (“total completions”), and declines when the opposite occurs.
IJs have some degree of control over the number of cases they complete (consistent with resource constraints and due process), but they are powerless to control the number of new alien cases added to their dockets. That is solely in the hands of DHS immigration officers and reflects the impact of then-prevailing immigration policies.
Most significantly, when the border is secure and few migrants come illegally, the number of new border and port cases declines; when DHS lacks “operational control” of the border, the number of new cases that are filed rises.
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