Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Faces Hurdle: 4M Court Cases and Counting

The backlog of immigration court cases awaiting hearings has more than doubled since 2021, new data from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) showed Monday.

Over 4 million cases were pending, as of January 16, compared to the 1.7 million at the end of September 2021. The wait list, plus a lack of immigration judges, potentially stand in the way of the Trump administration’s plans to deport nearly three times as many.

“The courts have hired up to the maximum and so, under the Biden administration, they hired as many judges as they were allowed to by Congress because it’s Congress that sets the level of funding and the number of judges that the courts can get,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), told Newsweek. “But the larger picture here is one in which ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has an annual budget of more than $9 billion and the immigration courts by contrast have a budget as I recall of less than $1 billion.”

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Over the past decade, the number of judges available to hear immigration cases has risen, from 249 in 2014 to 735 in 2024. At the same time, the number of pending cases has also risen, going from 744,641 in 2015 to 4,006,396 in the first quarter of 2025, leaving each judge with around 5,400 cases each.

The Trump administration is hoping to cut the backlog through executive orders signed within days of the president’s return to the White House. One allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to use what is known as expedited removal for those who entered the U.S. illegally and have been in the country for less than two years. The process bypasses the courts and can be completed within hours.

Another memo instructed ICE to bypass the courts in cases of immigrants who arrived under the now-defunct CBP One app or through humanitarian parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans—another Biden-era policy scrapped by Trump.

Some immigration advocates, including the Vera Institute, have warned that attempts to prevent immigrants having access to legal representation, which have faced challenges, will also slow down court cases, as migrants are left to navigate the system themselves.

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