Florida leads nation in pending immigration cases

The Donald Trump administration recently fired more than a dozen immigration judges, actions that experts say contradict a need for more judges given the millions of cases pending in immigration courts across the country. 

According to researchers at Syracuse University, Florida ranks No. 1 in the country when it comes to the backlog of immigration cases. 

As of December of 2024, the Sunshine State had 567,226 pending cases, followed by Texas with 490,004 cases and California with 405,230 cases. 

Local immigration attorneys are used to the backlog and have seen the number of cases continually grow over since the Barack Obama administration. 

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Immigration Attorney Eduardo Soto told NBC6. 

“The number of judges that we have can't have enough hours of the day to deal with the population,” said Willy Allen, another immigration lawyer.

Oscar Casanella, 46, is part of the group of half a million immigrants who have pending cases in Florida. 

“I arrived on Jan. 6, 2022,” said Casanella, who was a cancer researcher and professor at the University of Havana. 

Casanella fled Cuba and used Latin America to get to the U.S.-Mexico border with his pregnant wife and four-year-old son. 

The family was fleeing the communist island following years of government persecution, he said. 

A video from May 2019 shows Casanella being detained by Cuban police during an LGBTQ march in Havana that was not sanctioned by the government. 

Casanella described it as a violent attack. 

“I was cuffed, beaten, wounded in my head,” he told NBC6. 

A month after he and his family arrived in the U.S., Casanella said he applied for political asylum, but it’s been three years and he has yet to see an immigration judge. 

“There are not enough immigration judges to be adjudicating all of these cases so they simply cannot keep up with the volume of cases being filed,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, who works at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan organization. 

Bush-Joseph said the massive backlog means people who deserve asylum protection wait years to receive it -- while others who are not eligible are allowed to remain in the country longer.

She added: “This all comes back to how the U.S. immigration system in general is extremely outdated, overwhelmed and under-resourced.”

In Florida, the problem keeps getting worse. Over a four-year period, Florida has seen roughly a 350% increase in pending cases going through immigration courts.

When asked what’s driving this increase, Soto said: “The amount of people that came into this country.”

“There are literally thousands of Venezuelans. If there were 300,000 Venezuelans with a TPS (Temporary Protective Status) that expires in September, those 300,000 Venezuelans, I'm willing to bet at least a third to two-thirds had asylum pending with the asylum office or already in court,” Allen said. 

That’s not including the hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians, who were granted humanitarian parole, a program the Trump administration is now ending.

Nationwide, there are more than 3.7 million cases pending in immigration courts, according to court data tracked by researchers at Syracuse University.

“It's hard to put it into perspective when you really think about it because essentially, it's charging each immigration judge with 4,000 or 5000 cases,” said James Fujimoto, who worked as an immigration judge for decades.

NBC6 contacted the White House and the Department of Justice, which oversees immigration courts, to ask about the extensive backlog, why those judges were fired and if their positions will be replaced. They did not answer our questions yet.

NBC previously asked the administration if they will expand the use of strategies like “expedited removal” to keep people out of the backlogged courts.

In response, the White House said, "During his first term, (President Trump) cut red tape to reduce massive immigration backlogs, and he will leave no stone unturned in fulfilling his promise to restore order at our border, deport criminal aliens, and fully enforce long-ignored immigration laws.”

None of this helps Casabella right now and he told us this legal limbo generates great anxiety, uncertainty and stress. 

Given what happened to him in Cuba, he could never go back. 

He’s arguably nationless.