Sanctuary cities in blue states are as popular designations as red states for illegal immigrants who have come across the southern border and been released into the United States to await removal proceedings in court, according to a data center analysis.
In the first 11 months of fiscal 2023, which began last October, Republican-run Florida and Texas, as well as Democratic-run California and New York, have each seen at least 100,000 immigrants in their legal systems, according to government data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University in New York.
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New Jersey and Colorado have each received 50,000 to 100,000 people, followed by Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia with 25,000 to 50,000.
“For the vast majority of these people, there is an incentive to get into court because that is the only way they’re going to get an incentive for relief,” said Adam Isacson, defense oversight director for the Washington Office on Latin America. Once in court proceedings, immigrants can make asylum claims and apply for work documents.
But trends have shifted in recent months since the pandemic-era Title 42 health policy was rescinded in May. This year alone, the fewer than 700 immigration judges nationwide were handed 1.23 million new deportation cases.
More than 340,000 of those cases were added to immigration courts in June, July, and August.
Between June and August, the number of immigrants placed into immigration court proceedings in New York-based courts exploded, making it by far the most popular destination.
More than 41,000 immigrants who were let loose at the border and given notices to appear in immigration court likely not until later this decade, traveled to the five boroughs.
Los Angeles County followed with 15,000, and Chicago took third with more than 14,000 new cases.
TRAC found more immigrants at the border were released and placed into the court system in August than in any month in history: 180,065. Nearly 10% of cases were filed in New York courts.
This month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, side-stepped the Biden administration and visited Mexico, Central America, and South America to warn immigrants not to travel to the United States.
Adams declared a state of emergency in October 2022, and he has been unsuccessful with calls for the Biden administration to stop the flow of people crossing the border illegally. The city has set up more than 200 shelters to accommodate immigrants in need of housing.
The only coinciding trend to the shift in where immigrants are heading from the border is where immigrants are coming from.
Between October 2022 and May 2023, immigrants from South America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa were the fastest-growing demographic of cases added to court dockets. Since June, more immigrants from Mexico and Central America have arrived at the border and been released into the country.
The demographic shift happened as the Biden administration imposed stiffer penalties for immigrants in certain countries.
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Courts nationwide are struggling with large backlogs, which all three previous presidential administrations have only added cases to.
“While the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) has ramped up recruiting efforts to add new Immigration Judges, decades of underfunding have meant that it has been unable to make a dent in the backlog which continues to climb. It has reached 2,620,591 at the end of August,” TRAC said in a recent report.
