Hundreds of immigration cases in Minnesota are sitting in limbo as the partial federal government shutdown continues with no end in sight, adding pressure to an already clogged system and leaving immigrants and their lawyers uncertain when hearings will be rescheduled.
A new report released this week says hearings in nearly 1,000 cases have been canceled so far in Minnesota — among more than 42,000 hearings that have been canceled across the country. There will be another 20,000 cancellations each week the shutdown continues, according to the report by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That would leave as many as 100,000 people affected by the end of this month if the shutdown isn't resolved by then.
"The immigration court system is already famously strained," said Graham Ojala-Barbour, an immigration attorney in St. Paul who is one of the leaders of the local American Immigration Lawyers Association. "[Immigrants who] already face a great deal of uncertainty in their lives because of their immigration status have now even more unpredictability and uncertainty because of this."
Cases for people detained by ICE are still moving forward, which is why, in Minnesota, two of the five immigration judges at the Bloomington Immigration Court are still working without pay. But the hundreds of pending court cases of people not in custody, such as those seeking asylum in the United States, are not being processed by the court, which is based at Fort Snelling and also handles cases in the Dakotas and western Wisconsin.
That adds mounting pressure on the system, which already had a backlog of more than 800,000 immigration cases nationwide and 8,500 cases in Minnesota as of November — most of which were cases of people not in detention. In Minnesota, cases have an average wait time of nearly two years.
The shutdown is creating an "unmanageable burden" on the court system and swamping judges, who are working without pay now, the National Association of Immigration Judges President Ashley Tabaddor wrote in a letter to all senators and representatives in Congress last week, urging an end to the shutdown.
"To add this artificial crisis … takes an already overburdened court into a new level of dysfunctionality," Tabaddor added in an interview, saying that many judges have more than 3,000 cases on their docket, booked out years. "There's no catching up to this backlog."
Some 300 judges are furloughed, she added, and are frustrated as they dip into savings or try to find a way to pay their mortgage. She said she thinks many cases that had hearings canceled during the shutdown will be sent to the back of the line, pushing out cases two or three years.
