(Bloomberg) -- The shutdown of the federal government over the president's campaign promise to build a wall along the southern U.S. border is taking its toll on already backed-up immigration courts.
Hearings for non-detained individuals are being taken off the calendar due to the lack of funding and will need to be rescheduled once the partial shutdown ends. The problem will be finding an opening for those cases on judges' calendars, which are already filled up for the coming three years or more.
“Finding available time slots to reschedule hearings could result in years of further delay,” said Susan Long, co-director of Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which gathers data on federal spending.
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As of May 2018, there were a record 714,067 immigration cases pending. In some courts, immigrants have to wait more than four years before they get a chance to plead their case before a judge, according to TRAC data.
Judge Dana Leigh Marks, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Immigration Judges, said in a Jan. 9 interview on PBS that the impact of the shutdown has been “devastating” and that it could add another three or four years to the wait for immigrants that are on her docket.
Representatives of the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
--With assistance from Kartikay Mehrotra.
To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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