The immigration court system in Illinois is swamped with more than 20,000 pending deportation cases, forcing immigrants seeking asylum to wait as long as three years simply to receive a hearing date for their cases to go before a judge.

The overflow number of cases is more than five times the total put before the court just a decade ago and the sharp increase shows little sign of abating any time soon.

Asylum Seekers Left in Limbo

According to Michael Jarecki, second vice chairman of the American Immigration Lawyers Association's Chicago chapter, many of his clients have cases strong enough to earn them legal status, but are instead "languishing as asylum applicants" due to the massive backlog.

Nationally, Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse reports the number of pending removal cases in the immigration court system has swelled over the last 10 years from roughly 170,000 in fiscal year 2006 to over 485,000 this fiscal year.

Of those cases, which are all overseen by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review, roughly one in five are applications for asylum in which an immigrant has to prove he is subject to persecution or danger in his home country.

Other deportation cases involve defenses such as people who have children who are U.S. citizens or people who are victims of domestic violence.

In Chicago, on average an immigrant applicant is forced to wait 1,046 days to actually have a case heard and the wait has been that long for a while now.

"We've been dealing with backlogs here in Chicago for a number of years now, and we've just seen them get increasingly worse," said attorney Ashley Huebner, who also manages the National Immigrant Justice Center's Asylum Project, a legal clinic that handles many of Chicago's asylum cases. "Our court is basically grinding to a halt at this point," she added.

Number of Chicago Judges on Decline

At the end of fiscal year 2011, there were nine immigration judges in Chicago, but by early 2015 that number had dropped to just five, with a sixth judge being added about two months ago.

At any moment, any of those judges can be reassigned to hear cases involving people already facing deportation, prolonging the wait for asylum seekers.

Across the country, there are 259 immigration judges spread across 57 courts. The Human Rights First organization has recommended a total of 524 judges to ease the backlog, but this fiscal budget only calls for the addition of 55 new immigration judges.

Beyond the staffing shortages, much of the backlog can be attributed to the prioritization given to Central American related cases. In 2014, the U.S. saw a spike in illegal border crossings by immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, including many families and over 50,000 unaccompanied minors.

"We see this very devastating impact on asylum seekers due to these delays," said Huebner, adding that most of Chicago's asylum seekers come from Mexico, Central America and Central and East African countries. "It's been a real devastating impact on the family, on the clients' ability to have a stable existence in the United States and a severe impact on their psyche."

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