U.S. immigration courts are dealing with and the worst is in Miami, where almost a tenth of the nation鈥檚 3 million cases are currently being heard.
About 261,000 cases of migrants placed in removal proceedings are pending in the Miami court 鈥� the largest docket in the country 鈥� according to government data compiled by Syracuse University鈥檚 Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Immigration experts say it confirms how broken the U.S. asylum system is, especially as one political and economic calamity after another drives more and more desperate migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean to the U.S. southern border with Mexico.
READ MORE: As a record 3 million cases clog U.S. immigration courts, Miami has the largest backlog
Randy McGrorty, executive director of Catholic Legal Services, told 港澳天下彩in an interview on Friday that he sees the current situation as unprecedented and more than just an immigration crisis.
鈥淚 personally have not seen this amount of people on the move in the western hemisphere ever before. So there are larger crises going on that are impacting what's happening at our southern border," McGrorty told 港澳天下彩South Florida Roundup host Tim Padgett.
McGrorty references cartels, the economies being shut down during the pandemic, and issues that are more complex than poverty and seeking a better life as reasons behind the large number of people migrating to the United States. He calls it a humanitarian crisis.
He says Cuban, Venezuelans, Haitiians and Nicaraguans 鈥� the largest number migrants at the U.S. southern border with Mexico 鈥� are fleeing countries facing political and economic turmoil. He notes that Cubans alone represent one-third to half of the Miami immigration court鈥檚 backlog.
He says that the provisions to be eligible for the Cuban Adjustment Act are very critical at this moment. Under the law, Cuban migrants are inspected and admitted or paroled. Being granted parole 鈥� not to be confused with the Biden humanitarian parole program 鈥� means that the U.S. government vets a person before they enter the country, grants them entry and reviews their case while they remain in the country.
This is what is supposed to happen but it's not because the sheer number of migrants has overwhelmed federal agencies in charge of immigration and border security, said McGrorty, who noted it has led to migrants, mainly Cuban migrants, being wrongly processed and not properly paroled.
He said as many as 200,000 Cuban migrants could have been paroled through the Cuban Adjustment Act.
鈥淸They could go through the] process instead of going through the immigration courts. The immigration courts then would have resources to address other more pressing cases. We don't have that. And advocates have been asking this administration to fix that problem, and they have been resistant and reluctant," he told WLRN.
Perhaps the most oft-mentioned solution is giving the U.S. asylum system more resources and staffing.
Backlogged courts, administered by the Justice Department, often get little attention in immigration debates, including in over the Biden administration鈥檚 $110 billion proposal that links aid for Ukraine and Israel to asylum and other border policy changes.
When migrants are apprehended by U.S. authorities at the border, with a record of their detention and instructions to appear in court in the city where they are headed. That information is passed on from the Department of Homeland Security to the Justice Department, whose Executive Office for Immigration Review runs the courts, so that an initial hearing can be scheduled.
More immigration court judges, resources and deeper training would benefit the current system, McGrorty says.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
You can listen to the full conversation above.
