GianCarlo Franco thought he had a hard deadline for his 16-year-old Salvadoran client: The immigration attorney had to file a brief by June explaining why the teen should be allowed to stay in the U.S. On July 3, a judge in Dallas would decide whether she should be deported or given asylum because she said her family had been targeted by violent gangs.

For Franco, this would be made more difficult by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' recent declaration that gang violence was no reason to grant asylum. A week before his brief was due, a worried Franco sought an extension to deal with this new complication.

The extension was denied, Franco said, because he no longer needed it. Unbeknownst to him, the teen’s hearing had already been pushed back to 2022 — eight years after she arrived in the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor. That’s because another recent Trump administration change had directed judges to handle newer immigration cases fastest, pushing older cases back in line.

The girl's case illustrates how rapid changes in the administration's crackdown on immigration have put additional strains on the nation's overburdened immigration courts. An ever-expanding list of changes to this stepchild of the justice system has increased the case backlog 32 percent since Donald Trump became president.

The heap of cases now tops off at more than 714,000 through May, according to a Syracuse University nonprofit that tracks cases in the U.S. justice system. The average case is now about 2 years old, according to TRAC.

About 204,000 immigration cases were resolved last year, while about 269,000 new cases were added to the backlog.

Immigration courts are not part of an independent judiciary as regular criminal courts are. They instead lie within the Department of Justice, answering directly to the U.S. attorney general. That makes it far easier for the administration to change the way they work.

Among the policy changes under Trump: Revising acceptable asylum arguments. Speeding up the completion of cases by setting a goal of 700 cases per judge per year in judges' performance reviews. Changing the priorities for when cases will be heard.

Some immigration attorneys say the administration’s changes have bogged down the courts even more.

“We still have people who got to the country in 2014 who haven’t even had their first hearing,” said Irving attorney Arvin Saenz, who's juggling over a dozen asylum cases for children or families who arrived around that year.

About two-thirds of the cases in the backlog are those of immigrants still waiting for their initial hearing, according to TRAC.

Immigrants released from detention by federal officials pending the outcome of immigration cases waited to get their bus tickets at the bus station in McAllen on June 10. (Nathan Hunsinger / Staff Photographer)

Immigration attorneys in North Texas say they see the problem only getting worse — although at least one former immigration judge believes the pain is temporary and the system will be turned around with the addition of more judges and policies that quicken the pace in the courts.

Long stays in the U.S. as cases wind their way through the system are "de facto amnesty," said Art Arthur, a former immigration judge and government prosecutor. He now works with the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative research group advocating immigration restrictions.

“If you are limited in the time you can stay in the U.S., you are not going to pay $7,000 to $10,000 to a smuggler,” Arthur said. “Eventually, that cuts into the backlog.”

In the courtrooms

On Tuesday, it was a typically busy day in the Dallas immigration courts at the Earle Cabell Federal Building. Cases old and new were going before the judges.

In one courtroom, about 20 migrant children as young as 5 — most were between 16 and 18 — listened to a legal orientation. Leslye Arauz of Catholic Charities used several posters to explain legal procedures to the children waiting to see the judge. She advised them on how to face him politely and call him “your honor.” She explained the types of visas and other relief they could seek.

“You need to be aware that your case will not be resolved today,” she said in Spanish. “But you will have more chances of winning if you go to every court hearing, don’t get in trouble and keep attending school.”

Then they waited until, one by one, they went before Judge Richard R. Ozmun to tell him their name, age and birthplace, all through an interpreter.

Many of the teens crossed the border without a parent in 2016 or earlier. Most now had a sponsor, relative or foster care parent at their side. Ozmun emphasized to each one the need to get a lawyer. Only three had an attorney present.

But in another court down the hall, Judge Deitrich H. Sims sat behind his bench in a mostly empty room, staring at a TV screen as he heard cases by videoconference with a room full of adult men in blue and orange jumpsuits at a detention center in Oklahoma. Many were accused of the civil offense of unlawful entry into the U.S. just within the last few months.

The Justice Department decision to hear the cases of recent immigration arrivals sooner has caused docket reshuffling that has intensified the court backlog, said Dana Leigh Marks, a San Francisco immigration judge.

Since 2017, Sessions has said he wants to show unauthorized immigrants that they can't slip into the country and then go free for years waiting for their cases to be heard, a process known as "catch and release."

“We must not let attempts to undermine our lawful immigration system deter the progress,” James McHenry, director of the immigration court agency, said in May.

Reprioritizing cases has been tried before. So-called "rocket dockets" prioritized the cases of unaccompanied minors in 2014, as the Obama administration hoped closing those cases quicker — and deporting the children to their native countries — would be a deterrent as an alarming surge of children swept across the border.

Migrant children slept in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville in 2014. (Eric Gay / The Associated Press)

Most sitting judges would not comment on the record about the Trump-era changes, but at least some appear to resent losing their discretion on setting priorities.

“We strongly believe one of the quintessential skills of a judge is docket management,” said Marks, speaking as the president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

“Our ability to manage our dockets in that very granular way is being taken from us by the current administration just as it was by the Obama administration.”

“There are very few courts that are able to accomodate a new priority without pushing back cases already in the system. There are just not enough hours in the day for judges to hear those cases.”

Other changes are causing angst.

Attorney Natalia Darancou cited a decision by Sessions this year to limit immigration judges' discretion to suspend or "administratively close" certain cases. These would have been taken off the books for special reasons, but the judges are no longer allowed to do so.

For example, Darancou said, she has clients who planned to apply for a provisional waiver of unlawful presence. The federal government can grant some unauthorized immigrants such a waiver if they can show that if they aren’t allowed into the U.S. to join a spouse or parent who is already a permanent resident or U.S. citizen, that relative would suffer “extreme hardship.”

People in removal proceedings cannot apply for the waiver, but previously, judges could put cases on hold so immigrants with qualifying circumstances could pursue that option, Darancou said.

“We had a lot of other options before that reduced the caseload for the courts, and [Sessions has] taken away those options,” Darancou said.

In a decision issued in May, Sessions said that suspending cases rather than seeing them through created a backlog of its own and left immigrants in limbo.

“This process — where immigration court cases were put ‘out of sight, out of mind’ — effectively resulted in illegal aliens remaining indefinitely in the United States without any formal legal status,” said Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley.

Wait times

Sessions and officials within the agency that administers the courts say their mission is to tackle the “overwhelming backlog.” Other measures have ranged from streamlining the lengthy process of hiring judges to increasing the use of video teleconferencing and sending immigration judges to the border in 2017.

To this date, the immigration courts agency still relies on a paper-based case management system that officials described as “inefficient, cumbersome and outdated.”

“The use of paper files also adds additional time to hearings as [immigration judges] are forced to constantly flip through files to track evidence during testimony,” the agency said in a February budget report requesting money from Congress for a “modernization program.”

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has revised the rules for acceptable asylum claims and restricted immigration judges from suspending cases. (Jim Beckel / The Associated Press)

Immigrant attorneys say that not all delays are a bad thing. Due process takes time, attorney Joshua Turin said. While noting that “judges are drowned in work and they are not acting in bad faith,” he added that he has cases that have been reset to 2021.

“No court operates in 24 hours,” he said. “Some of the delay is natural. So if they’re three years behind now, only some of that is due to bad policies. Some of it is due, to be fair to the government, to the fact that there’s a lot of people in the country illegally, and therefore there’s a lot of hearings going on.”

The delays can give immigration attorneys more time to prepare, but they can also work against their cases, said Franco, the attorney representing the Salvadoran teen with a hearing in 2022.

"It's great that the client gets more time here because if they get married, something could change" in the case, said Franco, who works for the nonprofit Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES. "But it's really difficult to prove a case that happened a long time ago in 2022, with kids that aren't going to remember everything. Evidence is already hard to get in our country; imagine to try to get it in El Salvador and these other places."

Hiring more judges

One solution to many of the courts' problems is to hire more judges. Most conservatives and liberals agree that more immigration judges and court resources would reduce the backlog. It’s one of the few immigration issues of general consensus.

There are about 340 immigration judges nationwide. In Dallas, there are seven, up from five a few years ago.

Marks said the federal government has set aside money to hire more than 100 more judges.

A hiring bout “is the most significant improvement that can be made to bring the backlog down,” said Arthur, the former immigration judge.

But on Thursday, Trump called into question the need for those hires.

“Tell the people ‘OUT,’ and they must leave, just as they would if they were standing on your front lawn,” he tweeted. “Hiring thousands of ‘judges’ does not work and is not acceptable - only Country in the World that does this!”

Congress must pass smart, fast and reasonable Immigration Laws now. Law Enforcement at the Border is doing a great job, but the laws they are forced to work with are insane. When people, with or without children, enter our Country, they must be told to leave without our........ — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2018