Pick any month this year and the immigration courts will hand you a record. Sometimes it's a record for cases closed. Sometimes for removal orders issued. And somehow, in the same stretch, it's also a record for the pile of pending cases still waiting. All three things are true at once, and that combination tells you more about the system than any single headline does.
TRAC at Syracuse University, the most consistent source tracking this data, put the backlog at 3,318,099 active cases at the end of February 2026 and roughly 3.2 million by the end of June — a slight dip from December's 3,377,998, but nowhere near a resolution. In the same window, judges pushed through case closures that hit an all-time high of 100,773 in June alone, and removal orders climbed from around 60,000 a month in the spring to just under 79,000 in June. New filings in June ran somewhere between 31,000 and 52,000, depending on the comparison year.
Read those numbers side by side and the contradiction resolves itself: the courts are moving faster than they ever have, and the backlog is still enormous, because the intake pipe and the processing pipe were never sized to match each other. You can hire more judges, schedule "mega dockets," push closures to a record — and if new cases keep arriving in the tens of thousands every month, the total barely moves. It's a bathtub with the faucet and the drain both running full blast.
A record for cases closed and a record for cases pending, in the same month, is not a system working. It's a system that has been undersized for a decade and is now being asked to sprint.
This is where I part ways with the cheerleaders on both sides. The people treating a rising deportation-order count as a pure victory lap aren't grappling with what "bulk scheduling" and mass in-absentia orders — over 500,000 of them since this term began, per the Washington Examiner — actually do to due process when a defendant never gets a real hearing before the gavel falls. And the people acting like the backlog itself is some novel Trump-era failure are ignoring that this number has been climbing, administration after administration, for years; it crossed a million before this president's second term even began.
Neither party built the courts to match the number of people arriving at the border or already inside the country awaiting a hearing. That's not a talking point — it's arithmetic, sitting right there in TRAC's own tables, for anyone in Washington willing to fund a fix instead of another press release about a monthly record.