Immigration court to be at center of Trump deportation effort
Alert readers will recall that I’ve written several times about the federal immigration court located at Ft. Snelling. Officially it’s the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
It’s part of the federal executive branch, not an actual judicial branch court. And that may prove to be important in the next few years. Incoming President Donald Trump’s top two campaign promises are:
- Seal the border and stop the migrant invasion
- Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history
These initiatives are broadly popular with the American people. Newsweek reported today:
As more details of President-elect Donald Trump‘s mass deportation plan are revealed, including a vow by border czar Tom Homan to go after all undocumented migrants, voters appear to still support the move.
New polling by CBS News and YouGov showed 57 percent of those asked supported the plan to remove at least 11 million people who have been living in the United States illegally, compared to 43 percent who didn’t.
Axios reports that the nation’s immigration courts will play a big role in this effort. Axios posted this headline on Twitter (X) yesterday:
To which the Twitter (X) account Zerohedge replied:
Just so. The most recent data available for immigration courts shows a national backlog of more than 3,700,000 cases. The local Ft Snelling branch shows a backlog above 42,000 cases, of all types, holding steady for several months.
Previously, I calculated the Ft. Snelling backlog for processing asylum cases (13,000) to be nearly 18 years. Axios “warns”:
The U.S. immigration system’s backlog of 3.7 million court cases will take four years to resolve at the current pace — but that could balloon to 16 years under President-elect Trump’s mass deportation plan, according to an Axios analysis.
Without a huge increase in immigration judges, millions of new cases would flood the non-criminal system. Trump’s administration likely would need new detention centers nationwide to hold people suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization — possibly for years.
Missing from the Axios analysis is one crucial fact. As Fox News reported last week:
There are around 1.4 million illegal immigrants in the United States who have been ordered deported by federal immigration judges, Fox News has learned.
Immigration judges have already done much of the work. What remains is follow through.
We’ll be following developments closely at Ft. Snelling.