Congress’s watchdog says a backlog of immigration court cases has more than tripled since the final months of the Obama administration.
Federal data collected and crunched by Syracuse University says nearly 17,000 immigration claims are pending just in Arizona.
The sum of pending cases in Arizona’s four immigration courts is a sliver of the national backlog numbering roughly 2.1 million.
The Government Accountability Office says the immigration court system run by an arm of the Justice Department completed a record number of cases last year. But the record for new cases was also reset.
A watchdog report says a 20-plus year effort to convert immigration courts from paper to a digital filing system continued to hit delays.
It calls on the courts director to make a plan to regularly test whether an online dashboard meets user needs.
