During the first two months of Fiscal Year 2018, the Immigration Court number of pending cases climbed by an additional 30,000.

According to the latest case-by-case court records, the backlog at the end of November 2017 had reached 658,728, up from 629,051 at the end of September 2017.

Despite the hiring of many additional immigration judges, there has been no apparent slackening in the growth of this backlog.

The rate of growth during the first two months of FY 2018 was in fact greater than the pace of growth during FY 2017.

California leads the country with the largest Immigration Court backlog of 123,217 cases. Texas is second with 103,384 pending cases as of the end of November 2017, followed by New York with 89,489 cases.

These and other findings are based upon very current case-by-case court records that were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

For further highlights see http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/apprep_backlog.php

And for full details, go to TRAC's online backlog tool at:

http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/court_backlog/

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse is a nonpartisan joint research center of the Whitman School of Management (http://whitman.syr.edu) and the Newhouse School of Public Communications (http://newhouse.syr.edu) at Syracuse University.