President Trump’s tightening of border enforcement has allowed federal judges to close more immigration cases than open new ones for the first time since 2008 – chipping away at a massive backlog that ballooned under the Biden administration.
Nearly 3.9 million immigration cases – more than the population of Chicago – were pending at the end of fiscal year 2024, and the load of new cases taken on outnumbered closures by over 1 million.
Under Trump, the backlog of active cases has fallen by more than 87,000 through the third quarter of 2025, according to Justice Department data.
Additionally, immigration judges have completed about 588,000 pending cases – well over the 448,000 new ones they’ve received.
Data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, also demonstrates the decline.
“This is the first time it’s happened in 17 years,” Andrew R. Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Post.
“We’ve seen this steady accretion of cases, particularly during the Biden years, as people were released at the border and given notices to appear in immigration court, which just expanded the immigration court backlog,” Arthur explained.
Under former President Joe Biden, the country faced one of the largest immigration influxes in US history.
An average of 2.4 million immigrants per year poured into the US between 2021 and 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office. About 60% crossed into the US illegally, a Goldman Sachs analysis found.
“The Biden numbers would be a whole lot worse than they are if they hadn’t terminated, dismissed and closed 700,000 cases,” Arthur said, noting that the previous administration may have been closing cases, but not necessarily removing migrants.
“Those aliens are still out there. If they didn’t have status then, they don’t have status now,” he said.
“I don’t want to call it a game changer,” Arthur said of the backlog decline under Trump, “because there’s a whole lot of game yet to go, but so long as [the Trump administration] can keep the border numbers low, and so long as they can start to get more judges onboarded, and crank the number of orders, the more that the backlog is going to decline.”
Arthur noted that aside from sealing up the southern border, the Trump administration has also moved to add immigration judges from the Department of War and Attorney General Pam Bondi has implemented policies that “enable judges to hear asylum cases a lot more quickly.”
Asylum cases take up the bulk – more than half – of the immigration court backlog.
A significant number of completed cases under Trump have been “in absentia orders of removal,” the immigration expert said, meaning cases are being closed because migrants “aren’t showing up in court.”
Arthur attributes that to migrants who crossed the border illegally under Biden, were issued notices to appear before a judge, but “never intended to come to court.”
The decline in the backlog under Trump is taking shape with fewer immigration judges on the bench than under Biden.
At the end of 2024, there were 735 immigration judges, while there were just 635 as of the third quarter of 2025, according to the DOJ.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” added more than $170 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, including $3.3 billion for immigration courts and judges, which should help further ease the backlog over time, Arthur said.
“That will go to expanding immigration judge hiring, expanding the number of courts, putting more courts down at the border, so the cases can be heard more quickly,” the former judge explained.
He also noted that Trump’s ramp-up in enforcement operations – detaining migrants – allows court cases to be adjudicated quicker.
“The difference between detained cases and the non-detained cases is significant,” Arthur said. “Generally, a detained case can be heard in a couple of months tops, but a non-detained case can go on for a couple of years to 10 years.”
The biggest beneficiaries of the drop in the backlog may be migrants with legitimate asylum claims.
“The more quickly that they can get into court and get an order, the more quickly their cases are done,” Arthur said, explaining that victims of legitimate political persecution from brutal regimes, such as the Chinese Communist Party, can “immediately petition” to get their family members out of harm’s way as soon as their asylum claims are granted by a judge.
“Everything is better in immigration when cases are done quickly.”
