Here's how many immigration cases could be reopened during feds' push

The federal government’s push to reopen immigration cases in administrative closure could bring the court backlog to nearly 4 million cases.

As of April, there were over 398,500 administratively closed cases in the immigration system, according to data published by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a sub-agency of the Department of Justice that administers the immigration courts.

Administrative closure puts a temporary pause on a person’s removal proceedings, usually because they have an application for immigration benefits pending with another agency or because they are considered to be low-priority for reasons like not having a criminal record.

Some North Texas lawyers have already begun to see administratively closed cases get put back on the docket, prompting concerns about their clients and their caseloads.

U.S. immigration courts currently have a backlog of over 3.5 million cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research organization at Syracuse University.

Will the government ‘recalendar’ all the cases?

The Executive Office for Immigration Review did not respond to an inquiry asking if all of the administratively closed cases would be put back on the docket, or what is called “recalendared.”

But word among immigration lawyers is that ICE plans to recalendar all of them, which would bring the backlog to 3,945,399 cases.

Either ICE or the immigrant in the removal process can request that a judge recalendar a case.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

“What we’re hearing is the judges are generally granting these motions to recalendar,” said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

She was unable to confirm whether all cases had been recalendared, but she and her colleagues have heard that “that is ICE’s goal.”

Adding almost half a million cases to the immigration court docket could significantly affect the court system and the millions of people facing removal orders, Dojaquez-Torres said.

“There’s a lot of reasons why cases get administratively closed, and so to suddenly put all of these cases back on the active docket, that will definitely cause delays,” she said.

For example, a person with a case before an immigration judge might have had their case put in administrative closure while their application for residency through a family member gets processed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Recalendaring such cases “puts those people in jeopardy” while they wait out these or other applications, she said, “and then suddenly their case is being re-docketed for removal proceedings.”

Dallas-based immigration lawyer Paul Hunker echoed her analysis, saying the added cases will “definitely add to the backlog” and strain the system.

“It will lengthen the time it takes for noncitizens to complete their cases,” he said.

Hunker, who has worked as chief counsel for ICE, said he has also heard that recalendar requests are being granted quickly.

What’s the timeline for recalendaring the immigration cases?

To get an idea of how long it would take to recalendar 400,000 cases, Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, looked back at the first fiscal year of President Donald Trump’s first term. The Executive Office for Immigration Review recalendared 15,000 cases that year with around 200 fewer judges, he said.

The American Immigration Council is a nonpartisan Washington-based think tank that “values immigrants as vital contributors to our nation,” according to its website.

The process can be done rather quickly, Orozco said, as recalendaring “doesn’t have to include a strong analysis.” It is ultimately up to the judge’s discretion.

“They can just decide to recalendar, so I think it depends on how quickly EOIR would want to recalendar cases and what their capacity is like,” he said.

But even an increase of around 10% will strain that capacity. Firings at the beginning of Trump’s second term brought the number of immigration judges down from 735 to 701, pushing the average caseload per judge to over 5,000, an already “insurmountable number of cases,” Orozco said.

And that strain will not exclusively burden judges. It will also affect immigration lawyers and their clients, Dojaquez-Torres said.

“Having 10, 15, 20 of your cases reopened that have been administratively closed is going to put a lot of stress on the workloads of immigration attorneys, in addition to putting a lot of hardships on the clients,” she said.

Clients, for example, may have trouble even being aware that their cases have been recalendared. If a lawyer has moved firms or retired — as some cases have been administratively closed for 10 years or more — the court may fail to notify the correct attorney. And firms might have trouble locating clients. If a client who is unaware of a hearing fails to appear, they can be subject to an in absentia removal order, “essentially a judge ordering someone deported while they’re not there,” Dojaquez-Torres said.

Immigration courts as ‘dragnet’ to arrest people

As recently as June 20, the Trump administration said it is getting “violent criminal illegals off our streets,” but the push to recalendar administratively closed cases appears to contradict that stated goal.

“Typically the cases that are closed are the ones that aren’t criminals,” Hunker, the former ICE chief counsel, said.

“What we’re seeing largely is that they are not just going after the so-called criminals,” Dojaquez-Torres said. “They are going after each and every person in any way possible.”

People attempting to gain lawful status via legal pathways are being “penalized simply for being a noncitizen,” she said.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review is an administrative agency within the Department of Justice, Orozco highlighted.

“This isn’t your typical court. Just because you say ‘immigration courts’ — it might have that image, but it’s not,” he said. “It is being used as an arm for enforcement.”

In May, masked ICE agents arrested people inside courthouses in Dallas and Phoenix, prompting questions of whether due process was being ignored.

Orozco pointed to such arrests, saying the immigration courts are being used as “a dragnet to be able to arrest individuals.”

Recalendaring administratively closed cases only forces more people to risk arrest while following the law or face deportation for missing a hearing, he said.

Jaime Barron, a North Texas immigration lawyer who has already begun to see clients’ cases get recalendared, said the government’s approach “appears designed to place undocumented immigrants in increasingly difficult situations.”

One part of the strategy is to deport “as many people as possible as quickly as possible,” he said.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order expanding the eligibility for expedited removal to people who cannot prove they have been in the country for longer than two years.

Recalendaring cases is a way to go after people who cannot be deported so easily, Barron said, even if the process can still take years.

“This prolonged legal uncertainty seems to be part of a broader strategy to pressure immigrants through instability and fear,” he said.