Florida has been a top partner in executing President Donald Trump's deportation agenda, finding and detaining people in the country illegally. The state leads the nation in pending immigration court cases, creating a massive backlog that determines whether immigrants can remain. The backlog is long-standing due to a shortage of judges and has been accelerated by the DeSantis administration's push to enforce mass deportations. Florida also leads in state and local agencies signing federal agreements to detain undocumented immigrants. The overloaded court system has raised due-process concerns. The Executive Office of Immigration Review reports a 391,000-case reduction but average waits remain about four years.
Florida has been a top partner in executing President Donald Trump's deportation agenda finding and detaining people who are in the country illegally. Florida also leads in what has become a nationwide problem: a massive backlog in immigration court cases that determine whether an immigrant can stay in the country. It's a long-standing problem wherein cases have piled up over the years in front of a shortage of judges.
Spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly wrote in an email that the Executive Office of Immigration Review at the Department of Justice will continue to use all of its resources to adjudicate immigration cases fairly, expeditiously, and uniformly consistent with due process. She said the pending caseload has fallen by more than 391,000 cases since the start of the second Trump administration. That is about 12% of the total number of pending cases.
But it's being accelerated in part as Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration has pushed to be at the fore of executing Trump's mass deportation agenda. Florida leads the U.S. in the number of state and local law enforcement agencies that have signed agreements with the federal government that allow them to detain immigrants in the country illegally. The upshot is an increasingly strained immigration court system so overloaded that former judges and advocate groups say people aren't getting due process.
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