A couple of days ago the Biden Administration announced that through the CBP One application immigrants will be able to schedule their appointments to facilitate the asylum application process in the United States. However, a recent syracuse university study that was picked up by Telemundo announced that there is a significant backlog in immigration courts which currently exceeds 2 million cases.
According to the study, at least 800,000 asylum applications are stuck in immigration courts where on average you have to wait up to four years for a hearing before immigration officials or judges.
The growing accumulation of asylum applications in the United States shows that the authorities in charge of immigration processes are saturated due to the huge number of asylum applications awaiting hearings, which have reached at least 1.6 million people.
“At the end of fiscal year 2012, more than 100,000 asylum cases were pending in the Immigration Court backlog. A decade later, the backlog of asylum applications had increased sevenfold to more than 750,000 cases by September by the end of FY 2022. Since then, only in the first two months of FY 2023 (October-November 2022 ), the backlog of asylum applications increased by more than 30,000 new cases and now stands at 787,882″, reveals the study.
Almost six out of ten of the Court’s asylum applications come from people from just five countries. Guatemala has the highest number, followed by Honduras, El Salvador and Mexico. Although the accumulation is each time from Venezuela, Cuba and Brazil.
According to Syracuse University, Florida, Texas and California are the states with the longest delays in immigration courts and this is largely because there are not enough judges available relative to the volume of asylum cases that need to be heard “therefore, it is not surprising that as asylum seekers from different countries are located in different regions of the country and their relative numbers change, the delays in the processing of asylum applications will also reflect these changes.