With a new judge just arriving, we are hoping to see some positive changes soon, as cases have been mounting up at the court docket in Dallas Immigration Court since last year.
One of the immigration deportation cases that was referred by Dallas Immigration & Custom Enforcement (ICE) Office to the Dallas Immigration Court for deportation proceedings at the beginning of the year, of which Yu, South & Associates is the attorney of record, for example, has not made its way through the front desk at the Court over the past 7 and a half months, and we are still waiting for the initial case assignment and its first hearing notice on the case as of this date.
The delay in processing those cases at the Dallas Immigration Court was so serious that it became “news-worthy” to the media and Dallas Morning News, one of the nation’s major newspapers, had a story by Avi Selk today titled “Dallas immigration court's backlog hits 10-year high” and the article reported the following statistics:
According to the Syracuse study, the Dallas court accounts for nearly 18 percent of Texas' total backlog, nearly 15,000 cases. On average, immigrants have been waiting nearly eight months for a decision in the Dallas court. That's longer than any of the seven other immigration and detention courts in Texas, except Houston, whose average waiting time is 8.5 months.
The backlog of cases in Dallas' immigration court has reached its highest point in a decade, resulting in the second-longest waiting times in Texas, a new national study shows.
At the end of April, Dallas had 2,633 pending cases, and the only courts with more were in San Antonio and in Houston which has the longest waiting time of over 8 months. Overall, the number of immigration cases handled by the administrative judges in Dallas, including bonds, motions and removal proceedings, has climbed more 50 percent since fiscal year 1999, mostly as a result of larger caseloads, the complexity of immigration disputes and the lack of enough administrative judges and resources to help them.
The backlog causes problems "for everyone caught up in it," said Susan Long, co-director of the clearinghouse. "For a person being detained on a charge to be removed from the country, they've lost their freedom," she said. And for taxpayers, she said, it costs "every day people are detained."
CASES PENDING IN TEXAS IMMIGRATION COURTS
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*Click here for the original article by Avi Selk in Dallas Morning News.
If you or someone you know might have a case pending or coming up in the Dallas Immigration Court or any other immigration court system in Texas or elsewhe and would like to ask a question about the backlog or any other related matters, please contact the attorney in charge of your case at Yu, South & Associates, and if you don’t know the contact information of the person working on your case at Yu, South & Associates, you can simply click here to send your questions directly to:
Yu, South & Associates, Where YOU Matter the Most.