Can President-elect Trump pull off the largest deportation in U.S. history, given the highly complex process of spotting, detaining, holding and evicting people in the U.S. illegally?
The judicial process — one small piece of a long, expensive deportation machinery — illustrates the complexity ahead.
The immigration system's backlog of 3.7 million court cases will take four years to resolve at the current pace, and that could balloon to 16 years under Trump's mass deportation plan, Axios reports.
Without a huge increase in immigration judges, millions of new cases would flood the non-criminal system. Trump likely would need new detention centers nationwide to hold people suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization — possibly for years.
The administration also would have to set up a range of monitoring systems for immigrants who aren't detained but are awaiting court dates.
Experts estimate the whole operation could cost taxpayers $150 billion to $350 billion.
Immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. without authorization are afforded due process by the nation's immigration court system, which is also where asylum seekers and other immigrants who may have legal avenues to live in the U.S. make their case.
Of the 3.7 million pending immigration cases, 1.6 million are for asylum seekers waiting on formal hearings or case decisions.
Immigration courts closed 900,000 cases from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, says the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. That's the most cleared cases in a fiscal year, and 235,000 more than the previous year.
At that pace, immigration courts wouldn't clear all active cases until 2028. Add 11 million undocumented immigrants who Trump said would be part of his mass deportation plan and the backlog would go into 2040 at the current pace.
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