The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — the DOJ agency that oversees the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — announced recently that it had onboarded 77 permanent immigration judges (IJs) and five temporary IJs, which it described as “the largest class in” its “history”. None too soon, because even though the immigration court backlog fell under Trump II in FY 2025 for the first time in 17 years, there are still nearly four million pending cases awaiting adjudication. Our immigration system isn’t “broken”, and these new resources will help to get it back on track.
Immigration Judge Staffing and the Immigration Court Backlog
In FY 2016, the year after I left the immigration court bench and returned to work for Congress, there were just short of 290 IJs handling nearly 826,500 pending immigration court cases — and average of 2,860 cases per judge.
EOIR has long been underfunded and understaffed, but Jeff Sessions — Trump’s first attorney general in his first administration — and his successors prioritized IJ hiring, and by the end of FY 2019, the IJ corps had increased by more than 150 judges, a 53-percent increase over three years.
Unfortunately, the number of pending cases increased by more than 68 percent over that period, and the average IJ had a docket of nearly 3,150 cases by the end of FY 2019.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced the closure of most non-detained immigration courts in the latter half of FY 2020, and by the end of that fiscal year the backlog stood at 1.552 million cases, most going nowhere fast.
And then came the Biden administration.
By law, DHS is required to detain all inadmissible aliens encountered by CBP officers at the ports and migrants crossing into the United States illegally, but Biden and his DHS Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, released at least 88.5 percent of the encountered aliens who were processed under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
I say “processed under the INA” because between March 2020 and May 2023, CDC pandemic-related expulsion orders, issued under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, required DHS to turn back all aliens who came illegally or without proper documents, with limited exceptions.
Trump I largely complied with those “Title 42” orders: For example, of the more than 284,000 illegal migrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border between October 2020 and January 2021, 87 percent (247,000-plus) were expelled.
After Biden took over, Mexico increasingly refused to accept Title 42 returns (and Mayorkas’s DHS increasingly failed to expel aliens encountered by CBP), and of the more than 2.2 million aliens apprehended by Border Patrol in FY 2022, just over 1.054 million (47.8 percent) were returned under Title 42. The rest ended up in the “Title 8”, INA immigration system.
While many released aliens absconded before they were placed into proceedings, most ended up on the immigration court docket, 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”.
The Trump II Backlog Decline
Two key factors drive the immigration court backlog: (1) “total completions” by IJs of cases pending on their dockets; and (2) “initial receipts”, that is new Notices to Appear (“NTAs”, charging documents in removal proceedings) DHS files with the immigration courts for aliens deemed to be removable from the United States.
During the Biden years, most initial receipts 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 (an outspoken critic of Mayorkas’s border policies), has brought a historic level of calm to the Southwest border since the spring of 2025, the number of new NTAs filed in the immigration courts has plummeted under the current administration, from nearly 1.8 million in FY 2024 to just over 238,000 in the first half of FY 2026.
That decline in initial receipts gave IJs the space to address the backlog, and on average 1.42 immigration court cases were completed for each new one filed in FY 2025, a trend that accelerated through the first six months of the current fiscal year to roughly 1.7 total completions for each initial receipt.
Retirements and Discharges
Consequently, the immigration court backlog declined last fiscal year for the first time since FY 2008 (the depths of the “great recession”, when many aliens unable to find work opted to return home), even as IJ retirements and discharges drove the cadre down from 735 judges at the end of FY 2024 to 634 by the beginning of FY 2026.
That retirement and discharge trend continued into the current fiscal year, and by March 30 just 587 IJs were hearing cases, supplemented by 68 “temporary” IJs for a total force of 655 IJs.
An untold number of those temporary IJs were “rehired annuitants” (retired IJs and federal government lawyers brought back into service to hear cases) and Department of War attorneys, assigned on temporary details to the immigration courts under a Trump II scheme to keep the backlog manageable.
“EOIR Announces 77 Immigration Judges and 5 Temporary Immigration Judges”
Which brings me to the May 21 DOJ press release, headlined “EOIR Announces 77 Immigration Judges and 5 Temporary Immigration Judges: Largest Class in Agency’s History”.
As per that announcement, these hirings will bring the IJ corps to “nearly 700”, i.e., close to the total of 735 judges hearing cases at the end of FY 2024, and if true (and there’s no reason to think it isn’t) those 82 new immigration judges would far and away be the “largest IJ class in EOIR history”.
There is a learning curve new immigration judges experience after onboarding, and even though I had more than 14 years of immigration experience when I took the bench in November 2006, my early dockets consisted of about half as many cases as my more experienced colleagues were handling.
That respite was brief, however, and soon I was hearing more than 1,500 cases per year, nearly all to completion. That said, I had the benefit of handling “detained” cases involving aliens in ICE custody, where there were fewer continuances because aliens and the government both wanted things done as quickly as possible.
Given the massive expansion in ICE detention space under Trump II, from fewer than 38,000 daily beds to hold detained aliens in FY 2024 to more than 60,000 at last count, many of the new IJs will likely be assigned to hear cases involving aliens in custody as well, meaning quicker completions of removal proceedings and fewer pending cases.
Our immigration system isn’t “broken”, regardless of what detractors and other soi-disant “experts” may claim: Various administrations have simply refused to comply with the rules Congress created in the INA, deliberately, inadvertently, and occasionally out of a misguided sense of “justice”.
Resources are key to a proper functioning immigration system, but immigration courts were starved for resources for years and backlogs in removal proceedings became an ever-larger chokepoint impeding the smooth performance of that system. The IJ cavalry is here, and resources are pouring into EOIR; the only question is for how long, and how well those resources are apportioned.