California's Immigration Courts Buried Under Massive Backlog As Government Shutdown Grinds On

Green card holder Jasmine Ngo has waited nearly seven years to see an immigration judge. The single mother of two was supposed to have her day in court earlier this month in San Francisco. But her hearing was canceled, as most immigration judges remain furloughed during the ongoing federal government shutdown.

“It’s been seven years of stress for me because it's hard to move forward when you have something hanging over your head,” said Ngo, 42, who lives in Lake Elsinore (Riverside County) and works as a caregiver for seniors. She was born in the Philippines and has been a lawful permanent resident in the U.S. for 30 years. But she is fighting deportation, after being convicted for shoplifting incidents in 2011.

Ngo now worries that after the courts reopen and her hearing is rescheduled, she may have to wait years to resolve her case.

Since the start of the shutdown, which is now the longest in history, California's immigration courts have cancelled more than 9,000 hearings, nearly twice the rate in any other state.

If the shutdown continues through the end of the month, researchers expect as many as 25,000 cancellations in California alone — and more than 100,000 nationally.

The shutdown-induced delays threaten to further strain the country’s overburdened system of immigration courts, leaving throngs of immigrants in extended legal limbo.

"Because we are so backlogged and short-staffed, the calendars are jampacked and basically full for the next two to three years," said Dana Leigh Marks, one of 20 immigration judges in San Francisco, and a past president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Immigration courts in California have the largest backlog of pending cases in the nation, more than 140,000 according to researchers with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Marks, who is currently furloughed, said she will try to squeeze as many canceled hearings back into her schedule as she possible, but also doubts that many people can be accommodated.

“By and large they're going to go to the end of the line,” said Marks, who herself has 4,000 pending cases.

The only court proceedings being conducted during the shutdown are for people currently held in detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That means three of San Francisco’s immigration judges are holding court and working without pay, said Marks.

Marks said immigrants with strong cases often suffer because of long delays, as witnesses often become hard to locate and documentary evidence grows stale.

But ironically, Marks added, weaker cases that are not likely to succeed can benefit, as immigrants gain more time to bolster their claims.

KQED’s requests for comment to the Executive Office of Immigration Review — part of the U.S. Department of Justice, which oversees the nation’s 60 immigration courts — went unanswered. Automatic email replies from public information officials at the agency said they were also furloughed.

Mario Guzman, an 18-year-old asylum applicant, said he spent months preparing with his attorney to attend a court hearing that evaporated because of the shutdown.

The high school senior, who arrived in the U.S. with a tourist visa in 2016, said he fled gang violence and death threats in his native El Salvador. He said gang members shot his 21-year-old cousin in the throat and back, an attack that proved fatal.

“When he was in the hospital, he wasn't able to talk, and even if he [had] survived he wouldn't be able to walk,” said Guzman. “Seeing how the life of my cousin was destroyed was really hard for me.”

Guzman will most likely have to revisit those painful experiences once more as he prepares for a rescheduled hearing, said his attorney, Helen Lawrence.

“It’s just pretty traumatic and he's a high schooler, so he's just trying to go about his teenage life,” she said. “I think for him, he would like to get it over with. To move on.”

Guzman, who lives with an aunt in Daly City, said he has applied to colleges in California to pursue a graphic design or animation major. But he knows an immigration judge will have the final say on his future in the United States.

“It's really hard because I can plan to do things here, but certainly I don't know how much time I have here,” he said.