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.
The same is true in the interior. As ICE officers arrest more aliens and place them into removal proceedings to obtain the IJ orders they need to deport those aliens from the United States, the number of new cases DHS files with the courts increases.
In FY 2016, the fiscal year after I left the immigration bench, there were more than 826,500 cases in the backlog — less than a quarter as many as today — but the trendlines were already headed in the wrong direction, as the number of new cases filed that year (more than 228,000) far exceeded the number immigration judges (IJs) were completing (fewer than 144,000).
By FY 2020, the last full fiscal year of Trump I, the backlog had soared to nearly 1.552 million, but that was just the start of the onslaught.
By law, DHS must detain all inadmissible aliens encountered by CBP officers at the ports and all migrants apprehended by Border Patrol who crossed illegally, but Biden and his DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, released at least 88.5 percent of the aliens who were encountered by CBP and processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Most ended up on the immigration courts’ dockets, but even though the number of IJs had increased to 735 by the end of FY 2024, they were saddled with a combined docket of more than 3.925 million cases — an average of more than 5,340 cases per judge.
Not that the Biden administration didn’t try to artificially drive down the immigration backlog by closing, dismissing, and terminating nearly one million pending cases involving facially removable aliens, legally questionable moves the staff at the House Judiciary Committee referred to in October 2024 as a “quiet amnesty”. It just didn’t have much impact on the backlog.
Trump II
Under the Biden administration, most initial receipts of new cases filed with the immigration courts related to aliens encountered by CBP at the borders and the ports who were placed into removal proceedings under section 240 of the INA.
Because Trump’s CBP Commissioner, Rodney Scott (Biden’s first Border Patrol chief but later among the most vocal critics of Mayorkas’s border policies), has essentially secured the Southwest border, the number of new removal cases filed has plummeted under the current administration, from nearly 1.8 million in FY 2024 to just over 391,000 in the first three quarters of FY 2026.
Through June 30, DHS filed just over 391,000 Notices to Appear (“NTAs”, the charging documents in removal proceedings) with the nation’s 72 immigration courts and three “adjudications centers”.
That means the department is on track to file roughly 40,000 fewer cases in the immigration courts than the 562,000-plus initial receipts last fiscal year.
At the same time, IJs have completed more than 660,000 cases in the first three quarters of FY 2026, which extrapolates out to 880,000-plus case completions by September 30, about 80,000 more than in FY 2025 (just fewer than 799,000).
Consequently, the immigration court backlog has fallen below 3.5 million pending cases since the end of the second quarter of FY 2026 (when it stood at just over 3.57 million), an 11.7 percent decline compared to the end of FY 2024 (roughly 3.925 million cases), and a continuation of EOIR’s successes under Trump II.
Immigration Court No-Shows
Much of the courts’ success in completing cases is attributable to the hundreds of thousands of aliens who simply failed to appear for their removal hearings.
Through the end of June, IJs have ordered nearly 477,000 alien “respondents” in removal proceedings deported and are on track to issue more than 635,500 removal orders by September 30, the end of the federal government’s fiscal year.
More than 278,700 of those removal orders through the end of the third quarter of FY 2026 were issued in absentia, when the respondents skipped their scheduled hearings, less than 18,000 fewer “no show” orders in just the first nine months of the current fiscal year than in all of FY 2025 (306,557).
What’s truly remarkable, however, is that more than 90,000 of those in absentia orders were issued to aliens who had filed asylum applications with the immigration courts but then decided to not attend their hearings to get an IJ decision on whether they would be granted that relief.
They Weren’t All “Asylum Seekers”
No single statistic better demonstrates how poorly reasoned and utterly disconnected from reality the Biden administration’s immigration policies — particularly at the Southwest border — were than that one. Let me explain.
The expedited removal provisions in section 235(b)(1) of the INA require DHS to screen aliens who entered illegally or without proper documents to determine whether they may have an asylum claim, a process known as “credible fear”.
If those aliens are found to have shown a credible fear of return, that is “a significant possibility” they “could establish eligibility for asylum”, DHS must place those aliens into removal proceedings before an IJ to apply for protection.
If not, DHS can quickly deport them without even filing NTAs with the immigration courts (or adding to the backlog), hence “expedited removal”.
DHS under Mayorkas, however, largely abandoned credible fear screenings, opting instead to simply issue those aliens NTAs and release them into the United States (which, as noted, is also a no-no under the INA), on the belief that all of those aliens were legitimate “asylum seekers” and should be offered “lawful pathways” to apply for that protection.
In fact, “asylum seeker” became a euphemism for “illegal migrant” almost everywhere under Biden: in the New York Times; CNN; NPR; the Washington Post; the Wall Street Journal; and even Fox News.
Many of those migrants may have come to “file” asylum applications, because 180 days after aliens file the I-589, “Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal”, they can be granted authorization to work in the United States. But as those 90,000 in absentia orders show, many if not most migrants had no intention of hanging around the courts to find out whether they would receive it.
The only reason aliens in removal proceedings would file I-589s with IJs and then fail to appear at subsequent removal hearings is that they were never really “seeking asylum” to begin with — they were seeking a way to enter the United States and the statutory delays in deportation and the work cards that filing asylum applications would bring.
Not convinced? Consider this: For every one alien granted asylum by an IJ in the first three quarters of FY 2026 (7,231 grants), more than 12 other asylum applicants were ordered removed in absentia when they failed to appear at an immigration court removal hearing.
And this trend is simply accelerating as more Biden border aliens show up on IJs’ dockets. At this rate, judges will issue more than 120,000 in absentia removal orders to no-show asylum applicants before the end of the fiscal year, more than twice as many as in FY 2025 (50,250 and change) and more than five times as many as in FY 2024 (19,069).
In FY 2019, “just” 10,585 respondents in removal proceedings filed I-589s but then were ordered removed in absentia when they failed to appear; the difference between seven years ago and today is Biden and Mayorkas and their feckless “catch and release” policies.
Time for DHS to Pony Up
EOIR has demonstrated that at least one agency can provide timely immigration statistics, and to its (and Commissioner Scott’s) credit, CBP publishes its monthly figures on alien encounters at the borders and the ports like clockwork, on or about the 15th of the following month.
The only stats missing are the most crucial ones: the total number of aliens who have been arrested in the interior of the United States and the total number of those who have been deported.
The Center can examine the Census Bureau’s monthly data to get an idea of how much the unauthorized population has dropped since President Trump returned (though that number fluctuates due to how the data is reported), but those two figures — “interior arrests” and “interior removals” — are key to decoding how effectively the immigration laws are being enforced.
While few are likely to be happy with the results — some will say Trump is enforcing the law too harshly, others too leniently, and ironically many will argue that the enforcement has been both too harsh and also wildly ineffective — but the department has now had time to recoup after the deleterious impacts of Biden’s and Mayorkas’s enforcement policies and tell us what it has done under Trump II.
“Nature abhors a vacuum” as Aristotle kind of said, but many so-called “experts” quoted in the media and the Twitterverse love a void when it comes to hard facts, because it allows them to spin any tale that fits their agenda. It’s time for DHS to pony up, if for no other reason than to inform the debate.
EOIR Shows the Way
Immigration statistics tell a story, and the one the latest immigration court statistics tell is of a tribunal finally finding its footing after years of neglect. The most important point, though, is the degree to which the last administration allowed so-called “asylum seekers” to play on the sympathies of the American people for little more than a quick release from custody and a work card.