Many on the left embrace illegal immigration. They believe that borders are racist, and because of this, countries shouldn’t have them. But without borders, dangerous people could potentially come into our country and harm others. Fortunately, President Donald Trump is determined to keep Americans safe.

In order for Trump to be successful, dangerous illegal aliens need be deported from our country. However, our broken immigration system makes this extremely difficult. As a result, hundreds of thousands of deportation cases are backlogged

According to reports, our deportation process has completely broken. A recently released assessment by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the number of pending deportation cases has grown to 437,000. This means that for every one judge, there approximately 1,456 ongoing cases. Because of this, the normal wait time to see a judge has increased from 198 days to 404 days. What’s worse, some judges are left with no choice but to schedule hearings as far out as 2022.

Upon reviewing the GAO’s assessment, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) concluded that the increase in ongoing deportation cases is surprisingly not due to an increase in illegal immigration. Andrew R. Arthur, a CIS fellow and former Immigration and Naturalization Service official, analyzed the assessment and explained that the backlog was actually due to a decline in completed cases.

Specifically, he said, “[the] GAO found… ‘the number of immigration court cases completed annually declined by 31 percent from Fiscal Year (FY) 2006 to FY 2015, from about 287,000 cases completed in FY 2006 to about 199,000 completed in 2015,’ even as the number of immigration judges increased by 17 percent over that 10-year period.” On the surface, Arthur’s explanation doesn’t appear to make sense. How could the number of judges increase but the number of completed cases decline? Fortunately, he provides an answer.

Based on his review of the assessment, he believes continuances, which makes cases take much longer than they should, are to blame. “One of the main reasons why IJs are taking more time to complete cases today than they did 10 years ago is an increase in the number of continuances that IJs have granted over that period,” he reasoned, adding, “after reviewing 3.7 million continuance records from FY 2006 through FY 2015, GAO concluded that continuances increased by 23 percent from FY 2006 to FY 2015 with ‘the percentage of completed cases which had multiple continuances’ also increasing during that period.”

He continued, “most critically, the cases in which the largest number of continuances that GAO identified were issued, those with ‘four or more continuances,’ increased from 9 percent of cases completed in FY 2006 to 20 percent of cases completed in FY 2015,” noting, “those continuances made an impact, as GAO found: ‘[C]ases that were completed in [FY] 2015 and had no continuances took an average of 175 days to complete. In contrast, cases with four or more continuances took an average of 929 days to complete’ that year.”

Delays like this are completely unacceptable. Illegal immigrants need to be removed from the country as quickly as possible. Failing to do so puts an unnecessary strain on our country’s resources. Thankfully, Attorney General (AG) Jeff Sessions understands the importance of speeding up the deportation process.

Earlier this year, during a speech in Arizona, he announced a series of reforms aimed at expediting the removal of undocumented aliens. “To support [Trump’s]mission [to crack down on illegal immigration], we have already surged 25 immigration judges to detention centers along the border. I want to thank personally the judges who answered the call to help us with this new initiative,” he stated, adding, “we will [also] put 50 more immigration judges on the bench this year and 75 next year,” he added.

Instead of waiting for nearly two years for new judges to be approved, Sessions will be “streamlining” their appointments. “We can no longer afford to wait 18 to 24 months to get these new judges on the bench,” said Sessions. “So today, I have implemented a new, streamlined hiring plan. It requires just as much vetting as before, but reduces the timeline, reflecting the dire need to reduce the backlogs in our immigration courts,” he continued.

However, to solve the court’s backlog problem, simply appointing new judges is not enough. Sessions also must work with the Trump administration and Congress to try and limit the number of continuances issued. Doing so will hopefully speed up our country’s process for removing undocumented aliens.