President Trump’s tightening of border enforcement has allowed federal judges to close more immigration cases than open new ones for the first time since 2008 – chipping away at a massive backlog that ballooned under the Biden administration.
Nearly 3.9 million immigration cases – more than the population of Chicago – were pending at the end of fiscal year 2024, and the load of new cases taken on outnumbered closures by over 1 million.
Under Trump, the backlog of active cases has fallen by more than 87,000 through the third quarter of 2025, according to Justice Department data.
Additionally, immigration judges have completed about 588,000 pending cases – well over the 448,000 new ones they’ve received.
Data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, also demonstrates the decline.
“This is the first time it’s happened in 17 years,” Andrew R. Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Post.
“We’ve seen this steady accretion of cases, particularly during the Biden years, as people were released at the border and given notices to appear in immigration court, which just expanded the immigration court backlog,” Arthur explained.
Under former President Joe Biden, the country faced one of the largest immigration influxes in US history.
An average of 2.4 million immigrants per year poured into the US between 2021 and 2024, according to the Congressional Budget Office. About 60% crossed into the US illegally, a Goldman Sachs analysis found.
“The Biden numbers would be a whole lot worse than they are if they hadn’t terminated, dismissed and closed 700,000 cases,” Arthur said, noting that the previous administration may have been closing cases, but not necessarily removing migrants.
“Those aliens are still out there. If they didn’t have status then, they don’t have status now,” he said.
“I don’t want to call it a game changer,” Arthur said of the backlog decline under Trump, “because there’s a whole lot of game yet to go, but so long as [the Trump administration] can keep the border numbers low, and so long as they can start to get more judges onboarded, and crank the number of orders, the more that the backlog is going to decline.” --->READ MORE HERE
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In Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, the immigration debate has spilled into the streets, sparking almost daily demonstrations while immigration agents ramp up arrests.
But in El Paso - a city in Texas on the US-Mexico border - the streets are unusually quiet.
A year after the BBC last visited the border to understand the impact of the migrant crisis on the border, sites that were once teeming with migrants lie largely silent.
Just a few years ago, as many as 2,500 migrants once camped outside the city's historic Sacred Heart Catholic church. Many lined the streets sleeping on donated blankets, idling while they waited for food and water to be distributed by local charities.
Now, only a handful of parishioners can be seen coming in and out of the church.
The same is true of a nearby park and of shelters throughout the city, where migrants once huddled to exchange their experiences of trudging through jungles and deserts or being detained, robbed or nearly kidnapped on their long journeys through Latin America to the border.
The influx prompted El Paso's government to declare a state of emergency in late 2022 as local shelters ballooned beyond capacity.
Then, when US President Donald Trump came into office in January - elected in part because of his promise to fix the border - the regular flow of migrants into El Paso slowed to a trickle.
It is a trend that has repeated itself along the length of the 1,900-mile (3,145km) border, from the Pacific Coast in California toTexas' Gulf coast.
Figures for detentions of border crossers are at a 50-year low.
In September alone - the last month for which complete data is available - 11,647 people were detained along the entirety of the US-Mexico border, compared with 101,000 in September 2024 and 269,700 the same month in 2023.
One volunteer network, Annunciation House, once ran as many as 22 shelters throughout the region, catering in large part to thousands of migrants paroled into the US to await court dates, often years in the future.
There are now only two. The relative trickle of migrants - 15 to 20 in each location on a given night - is composed, in part, of those headed back home after years in the US.
"We have people who entered and were given employment authorisation, or temporary protected status that Trump has taken away, and they can't renew their employment. Then they can't pay rent," Annunciation House director Ruben Garcia told the BBC.
Others, he added, are simply in need of a place to stay while "they can do the logistics" of leaving the country.
For some along the border, the new reality comes as a relief.
Demesio Guerrero, a naturalised US citizen originally from Mexico who lives in eastern Texas, described the border as "chaos everywhere" under the Biden administration. --->READ MORE HERE
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