Review of illegal immigration cases would cost billions more than budgeted

The office in charge of illegal immigration cases is more than $7 billion short of what it would cost for proceedings in every single case prior to deportation, an analysis by The Lion shows.

The ballooning costs, nearly 10 times higher than the current budget for the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), are significant because lower federal courts have ordered that each illegal immigrant apprehended by the Trump administration must appear before an EOIR court for proceedings, even if the EOIR already issued a deportation order.

Legal experts tell The Lion, however, that doesn’t bother liberal judges and activists, who aim to simply gum up the system.

Information from TracReports (TRAC), a data clearinghouse founded by Syracuse University, shows that in 2024, the EOIR completed 914,812 immigration cases, 850,000 of which involved deportation.

The backlog of cases now stands at 3,738,341 illegal immigrants.

Currently, the EOIR has around 700 immigration judges located in 71 immigration courts and three adjudication centers with about 1,700 government attorneys.

That level of staffing required a budget of $844 million for 2024.

According to the current budget and previous case load, to handle a surge in cases and take care of the backlog would require a budget of at least $8 billion and many more staff, which could take years to hire. 

Additional costs might include the vast number of lawyers required to represent the defendants in court. 

Although illegal immigrants do not have the constitutional right to an attorney, immigration law (Title 8 U.S.C. § 1362) gives them a statutory right to one. And while the government isn’t obliged to pay for legal representation in the same way as for U.S. citizens, some are clamoring for it. 

“The amount of Due Process that is required is lower than in other kinds of cases. Basically, notice and an opportunity to be heard,” Founding Director at the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence John Eastman, a former Trump attorney, told The Lion. “There is no constitutional right to counsel, but someone subject to deportation has a statutory right to counsel, but not at government expense.” 

Another constitutional expert told The Lion the effort by liberal courts is to gum up the works to blunt the effectiveness of the deportation operations. 

Director of Constitutional Studies Ilya Shapiro at the Manhattan Institute told The Lion liberal courts are attempting to create “just a huge backlog [of cases] to get through.” 

But in an era of hyper-partisan courts, the right to a government-paid attorney will likely be raised by a liberal judge, especially given that most illegal immigrants are unlikely to be able to afford an attorney. 

Already, some are making the case that not having an attorney puts illegal immigrants at greater risk.  

TRAC reports that the number of defendants who are represented by attorneys at EOIR proceedings fell from 65% in 2019 to just 30% in 2023. 

But that number is likely influenced by the unprecedented numbers of illegal immigrants that poured over the borders. 

“Between October 2019 and June 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported just under 11 million border encounters nationwide,” according to USAFacts.  

From 2015 to 2019, border encounters averaged about 500,000 annually. 

The American Immigration Council (AIC) has hinted that providing more attorneys, likely at government expense, is the panacea to an immigration crisis that critics say already suffers from too much law and lawyering. 

“The research is clear – the most effective way to ensure some level of due process for people navigating our broken and complicated immigration system is for them to do so with the help of a trained attorney at their side,” claimed AIC.  

The federal government already pays for the legal expenses of unaccompanied minors at immigration courts under a 2008 anti-human trafficking law.  

The Trump administration terminated a contract with a non-profit to provide that representation, but a federal court restored it, reported the Los Angeles Times.   

Beyond the huge financial burden of reviewing each illegal immigration case, the Trump administration has also argued that courts and lawyers have abused the legal process to include coaching clients to lie to courts to obtain humanitarian status that allows them to stay in the U.S.