Immigration Case Backlog Crisis

I've written periodically about the immigration case backlog. Syracuse University's backlog tool has detailed numbers. Right now (at least as of June 2014, with the fiscal year ending at the end of September) the total number of backlogged cases is 375,503. Of particular note is the fact that Central America is already high on that list. Here are the five countries with the most:

Mexico: 124,408
El Salvador: 48,319
Guatemala: 40,807
Honduras: 36,842
China: 26,969

This of course is why President Obama is seeking emergency money for judges. There is no possible way the children currently here (and the more arriving) can even get in front of a judge for a long time. The average number of days to wait is 587. He is asking for 40 judges (in addition to 35 in his regular budget request), which really seems inadequate. Some is better than none, but how much will that decrease the wait? The administration provides an estimate that each judge will decrease the caseload by about 1,000 per judge per year. That requires the judge to do almost three cases a day, 365 days a year. Once you insert weekends, federal holidays, vacation time, snow days, etc. it seems a stretch. Cases involving children also take longer.

And the backlog gets worse and worse--it has skyrocketed under Obama, which is more evidence that he has been enforcing the law aggressively despite efforts to claim the opposite.

2009: 223,809
2010: 262,799
2011: 297,551
2012: 325,044
2013: 344,230
2014: 375,503 (and counting)