‘DEVASTATING’

Over 42,000 Immigration Court Hearings Canceled Due to Shutdown: Report

“Each week the shutdown continues, cancelled hearings will likely grow by another 20,000.”

More than 42,000 immigration court hearings have been canceled due to the partial government shutdown, according to a new report. Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse released a report Monday stating that an estimated 42,726 immigration court hearings had been canceled since the shutdown took effect—a backlog that the clearinghouse said would have a “devastating” impact. “Each week the shutdown continues, cancelled hearings will likely grow by another 20,000,” the report warned. The report is the first detailed analysis of how furloughed judges and office employees have impacted an already backlogged immigration court system. According to Susan Long, a co-director of the clearinghouse, researchers arrived at the estimate by adding up the number of scheduled cases recorded in official government data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. The data the clearinghouse put out is also in line with what immigration attorneys and judges say they're seeing. "We do think every day cases are being canceled. We're looking at several thousand a day," Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, told CNN.

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