Both the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (“BIA”, the administrative tribunal that reviews immigration decisions) are components of DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and on October 29, EOIR took a victory lap as it announced its “Fiscal Year 2026 Significant Accomplishments”. They are pretty impressive, as the stats show immigration judges (IJs) are breaking all-time removal case completion records. The only question is how long they can keep it up.
A Quick Look Back at the Immigration Court Backlog
To put the current state of the immigration court backlog into context, you must first go back about a dozen years.
At the end of FY 2014, as the Obama administration was rounding the clubhouse turn and my days as an IJ were nearing their (voluntary) end, the immigration court backlog of pending cases stood at nearly 430,300.
That year, IJs received more than 230,000 new cases while completing fewer than 142,000 old ones, boosting the backlog by nearly 90,000 cases. If you’ve ever tried to balance your budget in a month when you spent more than you’ve earned, you’ll know that’s not an ideal state if affairs.
Part of the problem then was that EOIR was an afterthought, not simply in the massive machine that is the federal bureaucracy but also in the much smaller engine that is the Department of Justice.
Consequently, administrations didn’t request any large budgetary increases for EOIR, and under the “don’t ask, don’t get” school of political economics, Congress failed to adequately fund it.
Case in point is the fact that, at the end of FY 2014, just 249 IJs were hearing those roughly 430,000 cases, which meant each judge was assigned a docket of 1,728 cases — a heavy load but nothing like what was coming down the pike.
Then-Attorney General (AG) Jeff Sessions — longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a man who still cares a lot about immigration — realized EOIR had become a chokepoint and its backlog an issue and vowed to boost the number of IJs hearing cases.
By the end of FY 2018, nearly 400 IJs were hearing cases, which was good. The problem is the backlog continued to grow at a faster pace, and with more than 1.108 million pending immigration court cases by the time the fiscal year ended, the average IJ now had a docket of more than 2,805 pending matters to deal with.
Hiring continued under Sessions’ successor, AG Bill Barr, but a border surge largely consisting of adult migrants entering illegally with children in “family units” (FMUs) in FY 2019 overwhelmed DHS’s capacity to hold them all, and their subsequent releases just encouraged more adults with kids to enter illegally.
That drove the number of new immigration court cases even higher, and by the time FY 2020 came around, 442 IJs were dealing with a backlog of nearly 1.552 million pending cases, an average of more than 3,510 cases per judge.
The worst, as they say, was yet to come, and the first step in that process was the Covid-19 pandemic, which swept the world and shuttered immigration courts.
The CDC issued pandemic orders under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, directing CBP to expel most aliens who entered illegally, and while the Trump administration largely complied with those orders, the new Biden administration, increasingly, did not.
Then there’s the fact that President Biden viewed his 2020 election victory as a rebuke to immigration enforcement under Trump I, and consequently the vast majority of illegal migrants apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border who were not expelled under Title 42 were placed into removal proceedings and released into the United States.
By the end of FY 2022, the immigration court backlog had, accordingly, swelled to more than 2.1 million, and although the Biden DOJ followed Sessions’s and Barr’s leads in hiring new IJs, things at EOIR quickly degraded even more.
That backlog was assigned to (or more precisely spread around among) 634 IJs, meaning the average judge now had a docket of 3,320 cases, almost twice as many as in FY 2014.
Let’s just say that the end of Title 42 in May 2023 didn’t help things, nor did Biden’s attempts to hide the number of new migrants flooding into the country by funneling would-be illegal entrants through what the last administration termed “lawful pathways” (a legal misnomer).
By the end of Biden’s last full fiscal year in office, FY 2024, new EOIR hires had boosted the total number of IJs to 735 (good), but by then the backlog had surged to nearly 3.925 million (really, really bad), and by then the average judge was straining to handle a load of 5,340 cases — more than three times as many a decade prior.
Trump II
Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025 promising to fix the border Biden had opened, and he, “Border Czar” Tom Homan, and new CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott commenced to doing so in short order.
The trio (aided by 20,000 agents and countless support staff, with a hand from the Mexican government) drove annual Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border down from more than 1.53 million in FY 2024 to fewer than 238,000 in FY 2025 — an 84 percent decline.
As an aside, my colleague (i.e., the guy who pays me) Mark Krikorian has interviewed both Homan and Scott and they explain how the border was brought under control so quickly after Biden left, but the short answer is that if would-be migrants don’t think they’ll be released to live and work indefinitely, they won’t pay smugglers to bring them here.
Border apprehensions have long been among the biggest sources of new immigration court cases, and once they plummeted, the backlog began to fall.
In FY 2025, for the first time since the end of the George W. Bush administration in FY 2008, the number of immigration court cases IJs completed exceeded the number of new ones they received, and the backlog accordingly fell for the first time in 17 years, to fewer than 3.723 million cases.
Due to retirements and “attrition”, however, the number of IJs fell to 634 (the same number as at the end of FY 2022) and, as a result, the average IJ docket had 5,871 cases on it by the end of FY 2025.
“Significant Accomplishments”
IJ hiring picked up significantly in FY 2026, however, even as the number of new cases added to their dockets fell, which brings me to the “significant accomplishments” EOIR is crowing about.
By September 30, the immigration court backlog had fallen to just over 3.3 million pending cases — about a 16-percent decline compared to the same date in 2024 — while the number of permanent IJs rose to 753 and 36 “temporary IJs” came on board.
Do the math and see that the total backlog of cases per IJ is now a more manageable (but nowhere near relaxed) 4,184 cases, a 28.8-percent decline compared to the end of FY 2025 and 21.7 percent fewer than at the end of FY 2024.
By their nature, “temporary” IJs aren’t permanent, which means EOIR needs to keep hiring — and CBP needs to hold the line at the Southwest border — for this trend to continue.
That said, the nearly 974,000 immigration court cases those IJs completed in FY 2026 are an all-time record, and more importantly a 38-percent increase compared to the 705,295 cases they completed in FY 2024 — which if nothing else proves the judges are running at a blistering pace.
Don’t Ask for Too Much
Anecdotally, I have been told EOIR leadership is making increasing demands of those IJs, including by increasing the number of “merits” hearings they are expected to complete per day.
Merits hearings are what they sound like, the final hearings at which IJs determine whether aliens are removable and whether removable aliens are eligible for any “relief” that would permit them to remain.
Immigration attorneys are known to load up IJs’ files with lots of extraneous (and duplicative) exhibits, and IJs are required to review them all before they start hearing testimony.
That’s doable when a judge is expected to hold a couple of merits hearings per day, but when EOIR management starts demanding IJs to complete four (or more) a day, one of three things will occur.
One, the IJ will become an Evelyn Wood “speed reader” and retain everything, without confusing evidence in cases that often have similar fact patterns.
Or two, the IJ will make some mistakes the BIA must pick up when asked to review the case on appeal.
Or three, both the IJs and the BIA will be laboring under such unrealistic HQ expectations that major errors occur at the administrative hearing level, at which point federal circuit court judges — with more languid dockets, their own personal opinions about immigration, and a team of freshly minted “order of the coif” law clerks to back them up — will find the mistakes and drop the hammer.
Major news outlets, and Trump-unfriendly ones especially, live to highlight mistakes made by government functionaries in our current immigration system, and it wouldn’t take many high-profile circuit-court reversals to start a drumbeat of stories about how IJs, the BIA, and EOIR generally are “rushing to judgment” to satisfy the administration’s case-completion demands.
My unsolicited advice to the folks on the top floors of EOIR’s Falls Church, Va., headquarters is this: Give IJs brightline legal rules to follow in handling cases and issuing decisions and then trust them to do the actual judging. Asking them to do the impossible might bring short-term gains, but it’s a long-term loser.
Yeoman’s Work
With the border secure, fewer cases are being added to immigration judges’ dockets, allowing the courts to shrink a massive backlog that had been left to fester for years. EOIR is justified in touting its IJs’ achievements, but leadership should be careful not to demand the impossible — or to forget the agents on the border helping to make it all happen.