Immigration judges want union back ahead of Trump deportations

The big picture: Immigration judges are expecting a huge surge in new cases — adding to an already historic backlog of 3.7 million cases — once Trump launches his promised mass deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants.

• The U.S. immigration system's backlog will take an estimated four years to resolve at the current pace — which could balloon to 16 years under Trump's deportation plan, according to an Axios analysis.
• Of the 3.7 million pending cases, 1.6 million involve asylum seekers awaiting formal hearings or case decisions.

Background: The Trump-controlled FLRA stripped the NAIJ of its bargaining and union power in 2020 after calling judges "managers" who weren't eligible for union representation.

• The NAIJ challenged the decision in federal court, and won a ruling that said immigration judges were entitled to union representation.

What they're saying: "They need a voice as workers, as immigration judges," said Matthew Biggs, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which representing 90,000 public-, private- and federal-sector workers in the U.S. and Canada.

• Biggs says the immigration judges want fair representation and are worried about being overwhelmed even more with a jump in new cases.

• The union says judges typically spend only about 30 minutes on each case because of the pressure to tackle the backlog.

The intrigue: Immigration courts closed 900,000 cases from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

• That was the most cleared cases in a fiscal year, and 235,000 more than the previous year, TRAC reports.

What we're watching: An FLRA decision on the union issue could come in six weeks.