JOHN YANG:

William, for all the headlines and all the debates about what to do about illegal immigration, much less attention is being paid to the nation's immigration court system.

It's the first stop for most people charged with being in the country illegally. The current backlog is at a record high, more than 600,000 cases pending, with about 334 judges to hear them. The average wait time for a hearing is 672 days, nearly two years.

Earlier, I talked with Judge Dana Leigh Marks, who has been a judge in San Francisco for more than three decades. Immigration judges are generally prohibited from giving interviews, but Marks spoke with us in her role as president the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Judge Marks, thanks for joining us.

Help us understand how immigration counts work. Who appears before you, and what is it you're trying to decide or determine?

JUDGE DANA LEIGH MARKS, President, National Association of Immigration Judges: Well, immigration is often compared to tax law in its complexity, but I'm fond of saying that immigration law is even more complicated than tax law, because no one has developed a TurboTax for immigration law.

Immigration courts are the trial-level courts that someone comes to if the Department of Homeland Security asserts that they are in the country without proper status or that they have somehow violated a legal status that they had, such as being a tourist who worked or a student who no longer went to school.

We try to decide if they are in fact here in unlawful status at this point, and then decide if there are any benefits they're entitled to apply for under the very complicated Immigration and Nationality Act.