Immigration Arrests Are Swamping The Court System
Article publisher:
FiveThirtyEight
Article date:
19 May 2017
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
Trump’s agenda may have gotten off to a slow start in Congress, but his administration has moved quickly in another area: immigration enforcement. Immigration arrests during Trump’s first 100 days were up 37.6 percent from the same period a year ago, according to a report released this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Roughly 75 percent of those arrested had been convicted of non-immigration offenses, but approximately 10,800 were noncriminal arrests, up more than 150 percent percent from 2016.
Trump hasn’t just vowed to arrest undocumented immigrants [illegal aliens], however. He has promised to deport them. And that could be a challenge: The big increase in noncriminal arrests could create frenzy in immigration courts that are already overloaded with cases...
When Trump took office, he inherited an immigration court system with a backlog of more than half a million pending cases, with proceedings often taking years to be completed. The situation has gotten worse since Trump took office: As of April, the backlog had grown to 585,930 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University...