Donald Trump isn’t messing around this time. And the Left has been put on notice.
Now President Trump was handed a major victory that left Democrats completely speechless.
For the first time since 2008, U.S. immigration judges are closing more cases than they open, a direct result of President Trump’s tightened border enforcement that is steadily eroding a backlog swollen during the Biden years.
Justice Department data show the active caseload dropped by more than 87,000 through the third quarter of fiscal 2025. Judges completed roughly 588,000 pending matters—far surpassing the 448,000 new filings—according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
“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 Associated Press.
At the close of fiscal 2024, nearly 3.9 million cases—exceeding Chicago’s population—remained unresolved, with new filings outpacing closures by more than 1 million.
BORDER SURGE UNDER BIDEN CITED AS ROOT CAUSE
“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.
The Congressional Budget Office reports an average of 2.4 million immigrants entered annually from 2021 to 2024; Goldman Sachs analysis indicates 60% crossed illegally.
“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.
TRUMP POLICIES ACCELERATE CASE RESOLUTION
“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.”
The administration has fortified the southern border, reassigned judges from the Department of War, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has enacted rules that “enable judges to hear asylum cases a lot more quickly.” Asylum claims comprise more than half the docket.
Many closures are “in absentia orders of removal,” Arthur noted, stemming from migrants who crossed illegally under Biden, received court notices, but “never intended to come to court.”
The reduction is occurring despite a smaller bench: 735 judges at the end of 2024 versus 635 in the third quarter of 2025, DOJ figures show.
Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” allocates over $170 billion for border security and enforcement, including $3.3 billion for courts and judges. “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,” Arthur said.
Increased detention also speeds adjudication. “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.”
Legitimate asylum seekers stand to gain most. “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.”
