Trump’s Acting U.S. Attorney General, Todd Blanche, told senators Tuesday that he has asked for $37 million to help eliminate the Biden-era backlog of deportation-related courtroom cases.
Blanche told the senators that he has asked for the $37 million to put into an effort to modernize the DOJ’s outdated legal IT network to ramp up its ability to hear more immigration cases.
The AG appeared before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee to report on how the administration is addressing the dearth of judges, clerks, and infrastructure to hear the millions of immigration cases still left over from Joe Biden’s wide open borders fiasco.
After being asked by Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt about where the DOJ stands on the problem, Blanche assured the committee that the administration has a plan to begin plowing through the backlog of immigration cases, and that the progress has already begun.
He noted that the DOJ has already heard an unprecedented 500,000 cases last year alone and plans to ramp up the effort this year.
“We have almost 500,000 cases that were processed last year. That’s extraordinary,” he told the committee.
Blanche explained that the upgrades to the DOJ’s IT network will “create efficiencies that will help us in ways that should have happened years and years ago, and it didn’t.”
He went on to add that the DOJ is still hiring “a ton” of new immigration judges and that the department recently welcomed “the largest graduation of immigration judges in many, many years, if not history.”
The money he has asked for will also go to hire more clerks and support staff for the new judges, Blanche added.
But the problem Biden left is a huge hurdle, he said.
“When you have something like four million immigration cases backed up, even if you cut it down by a million a year, you’re still looking at three or four years to catch up,” he explained.
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The DOJ has, though, outright fired dozens of immigration judges because they were too lenient and working far too slowly to comb through the backlog.
Early this month, Blanche defended the policy, saying that judges need to adjudicate based on the law, not their “whims.”
“You take an oath and you’re not allowed to make decisions based upon what appear to be just sympathy or your whim,” Blanche said, according to ABC News.
“If there’s judges that are just not applying the law in the way that it needs to be applied, delaying inappropriately, have backlogs that are just unacceptable, they’re the folks that we’re going to try to find somebody different to fill that spot.”
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