Miller Mayer’s Steve Yale-Loehr was quoted extensively by Newsweek in Growing Backlog in Immigration Courts Could Slow Trump’s Mass Deportations. Among other things, Steve noted that the “average wait time right now for an asylum case in immigration court is about five years, so that causes a lot of problems. He noted that “[w]e have not funded the immigration court system adequately to be able to keep up with this increase.” Steve noted that “Trump said in the first administration that he wanted to deport more people and he didn’t really do that. You just cannot deport people without a hearing. Due process is embedded in the Constitution and it applies to everyone in the United States, not just U.S. citizens. So you can’t just round them up and send them across the border.” The article notes that Steve co-wrote a report in 2023 that recommends sweeping changes. “You certainly could also have more judges at the border,” he suggested. “If you had people who came in and had their asylum claims judged at the border within the first couple of months and then quickly deported,” that “would not add to the backlog and people would have a decision more quickly.” He observed that people “have problems hanging on for that long, or they evaporate into the shadows. [So] even if they are ordered deported, nobody can find them.”
