DOJ Tweets About Decline in Immigration Court Backlog — but Where Are the Stats?

The immigration courts are tribunals in the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and on April 4, the department proudly tweeted that immigration judges (IJs) in those courts had “completed THE MOST CASES IN @DOJ_EOIR’s HISTORY” last fiscal year (which ended on September 30, 2025). It’s a point I have made in the past, but key EOIR statistics haven’t been updated since mid-November and other immigration data is missing altogether. The administration should publish it all in the interests of government integrity, but also because those figures probably reveal an ongoing success story Trump wants told.

The Tweet

Here is the DOJ tweet in question:

And here are the facts.

In FY 2025, IJs issued just fewer than 767,400 decisions at the end of removal proceedings conducted under section 240 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and just over 22,000 orders in associated proceedings.

That’s a 15-percent increase in IJ removal hearing orders compared to FY 2024 (fewer than 666,200), but even that doesn’t do justice to the increases in the courts’ performance since Trump returned.

First, IJs issued nearly 485,500 deportation orders in FY 2025, a 57 percent increase compared to FY 2024 (fewer than 310,000 final deportation orders), meaning DHS is now in a position to remove more aliens from the United States.

Second, as I have explained elsewhere, the Biden administration (artificially) boosted immigration court completions by deliberately tanking (formally “dismissing”, “terminating”, and “closing”) pending IJ cases over a roughly three-year period.

That created what the House Judiciary Committee termed a “quiet amnesty” for nearly one million facially removable aliens, few if any of whom were eligible for immigration relief and, thus, few if any of whom currently have any lawful status in this country but are able to remain nonetheless.

What the Biden administration forced Border Patrol agents to do after apprehending migrants who had entered illegally at the border (release them into the United States), it also forced IJs to do with many of those same migrants who ended up in their courts (allow them to remain here illegally).

“Equity” was the justification for those immigration court terminations, dismissals, and closures, but it is a strained definition of equity that favors only those here unlawfully while ignoring the desires, needs, and interests of the American people and of justice itself.

Third, because the Biden administration left the borders open even as it was tanking nearly a million pending cases, the immigration courts’ crushing backlog continued to mushroom even as their rules were rigged to benefit those unlawfully here.

The backlog rose from just over 1.5 million pending cases at the end of FY 2020 to nearly 3.9 million pending cases by the end of FY 2024 — a 158-percent jump over that four-year period.

Not only did the Bidenistas flood the country with millions of largely unvetted aliens, they also overwhelmed the only process available to sort through all their cases to determine who should be allowed to remain, who should be forced to leave, and which ones posed the greatest threat to our nation and its communities.

Think of the United States as a boat with numerous large holes in the sides and bilge pumps that were increasingly swamped, and you’ll begin to understand the deleterious impacts the last administration’s actions had on the immigration system.

By patching the borders and expediting adjudications in the courts, Trump II was able — for the first time in 17 years — to drive down the immigration court backlog and give IJs breathing room to complete even more cases.

Consequently, DOJ was both correct in what it said in that April 4 tweet and justified in issuing it.

Where Are the New Immigration Court Numbers?

Notwithstanding the outsized role it plays in the immigration system, EOIR is a small agency that has traditionally been starved of resources.

I should know, as I both started and ended my service in the executive branch there, entering as a law clerk (before I even had a bar license) and leaving as an IJ.

Because of its lack of resources, EOIR has struggled to complete the administrative tasks agencies are expected to handle in the ordinary course of business, like issuing performance statistics the public can examine to see how well it is doing its job.

Most EOIR statistics haven’t been updated in more than eight months, and the key completion numbers haven’t seen a refresh since November 18.

Anecdotally, I have been told by former colleagues who remain on the bench that the courts are issuing orders at a pace that blow their already impressive collective performance in FY 2025 away.

It’s axiomatic, however, that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”, and those stats are the numbers pundits, reporters, and the public at large need to understand how well IJs are doing, and as a result, how well the U.S. immigration system is performing.

Where Are the Deportation Stats?

This issue is not limited to just EOIR performance figures, however.

There are only a handful of official resources to draw upon to determine how many deportations DHS has accomplished in the past 15 months, and none of them tells the whole story.

According to ICE statistics, the agency has removed just over 482,000 aliens since the start of FY 2025 (in September 2024), but they don’t distinguish between aliens who were first arrested by ICE officers within the United States and removed (“interior” arrests and removals) and those first encountered by CBP at the borders and the ports (“border encounters”) and removed by ICE (“border removals”).

If I had to guess, the reason why there are no solid figures on interior deportations is due to competing pressures within the administration to, on the one hand, increase the numbers of interior arrests and removals and, on the other, limit the numbers of arrests in a few key industries.

Moreover, partisans on both sides of the political aisle have their own reasons for claiming the illegal population in the United States is significantly larger than it is, and consequently even a half-million deportations looks like just a drop in the bucket compared to the total.

Total interior deportation figures that appear shocking to many, therefore, would be unacceptably paltry to others. As a result, perhaps DHS has decided to keep the figures to itself (for now).

The “Mass Deportation Coalition”

That’s a non-starter, however, for many of the biggest advocates of the president and his immigration-enforcement schemes.

The recently formed “Mass Deportation Coalition” (MDC), an umbrella organization of pro-enforcement activist groups, recently published its “playbook”, its roadmap to achieving one million-plus interior removals per annum.

One of the demands of the MDC effort is “complete data transparency”, which the coalition claims is necessary “to achieve confidence that the administration is still pursuing” Trump’s “signature campaign promise” of large-scale immigration enforcement.

Respectfully, “complete data transparency” is also simple “good government”, because a massive failure by agencies to publish their data in the past has fostered (if not vouchsafed and ensured) the fraudulent conversion of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, which a Trump II “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud” was recently established to address.

Open the Books Wide, and Let the People Decide

Kudos to Trump’s DOJ for tackling an immigration court backlog that has slowed our immigration system to a crawl for decades, but “complete data transparency” would assure voters that the president’s deportation promises are being kept. In our Republic, the people are sovereign, so open the books wide, and let them decide.