PHILADELPHIA — The backlog of pending cases in U.S. immigration courts has hit an all-time high of nearly 500,000, crushing the small corps of just 273 Justice immigration lawyers.

Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse just revealed that the backlog has hit 496,704 at the end of June 2016. That is up from 456,216 just nine months ago, and up from 408,037 two years ago.

The number has surged even as the administration has added a handful more judges. The current ratio is 1,819 cases per judge.

Democrats here for their national nominating convention are expected to call for more immigration and back amnesty for illegals aready in the country.



What's new in the latest figures is the growth of priority cases involving illegal unaccompanied children who have crossed the border in the last two years. The administration has told the courts to take care of those cases first.



But the sheer numbers have forced a huge delay. It currently takes nearly two years — 672 days — for a case to get to court. During that time, the illegals are allowed into the country and several reports show that they rarely make their court date.

The Center for Immigration Studies said in reviewing the new data that the rise of unaccompanied children is a surprise. And they added that many of those youths end up in the hands of smugglers and abusers.

"This is astounding because wholesale arrival of unaccompanied minors and women bringing their children illegally across our borders is a relatively new phenomenon in the decades-old problem of illegal-border crossers. It is one that has developed during the Obama administration because of lax policies that actually drive the flow because they force government agencies to act as the middle-men who complete the smuggling transaction of placing these minors and women with the families that engaged coyotes to smuggle them into the United States to begin with. And have no doubt, nearly 100 percent (if not indeed all) of these individuals get put into the hands of smuggling cartels — including the notorious, and notoriously violent, Los Zetas — to get them through Mexico and across the border," said a CIS post from former immigration official Dan Cadman.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com