Despite hiring hundreds of new judges, the nation’s immigration court backlog under President Biden has reached a record level, ballooning to more than 3 million pending cases in November, according to a new report. 

The backlog has grown by about 1 million cases since November 2022, according to data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.

Record levels of migrants crossing the southern US border under Biden, 81, have left immigration judges swamped, according to the TRAC report, with each judge now handling an average of 4,500 cases. 

“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Chicago, the third largest city in the United States,” the report notes. “Indeed, the number of waiting immigrants in the Court’s backlog is now larger than the population found in many states.” 

The data show that the pace of growth in the backlog is only accelerating. 

From July to September 2023, the backlog increased by nearly 400,000 cases or 130,000 cases per month. And from October to November 2023, monthly growth in cases rose by an average of 140,000 per month.

Under the Trump administration, the backlog peaked at about 1.2 million cases in December 2020 and monthly growth in new cases averaged about 47,000 per month. 

The backlog stood at 516,031 cases in the final fiscal year of former President Barack Obama’s second term in office. 

The Biden administration has hired 302 new immigration judges in an effort to chip away at the backlog, raising the total number of immigration judges to 734, according to the Justice Department. 

Each judge closed an average of about 975 cases in the latest fiscal year, according to TRAC, a closure rate “nearly a third greater than seven years ago during the final year of the Obama administration.”

“Even so, more judges and higher case closures per judge have still not been able to keep pace with the flow of incoming cases,” the report states. 

Nearly 2.5 million people were apprehended illegally crossing the border in fiscal year 2023 — a record-breaking total – and an estimated 670,000 migrants evaded capture.

Authorities encountered  242,418 illegal immigrants at the US-Mexico border in just November, CBP announced last week, a new record for the month.

Last Monday, US Customs and Border Protection officers encountered more than 12,600 illegal immigrants along the US-Mexico border, breaking a single-day record.