‘I'm just waiting': Texas immigrant among millions in years-long legal, administrative backlog

Yahoo

12-05-2025

Under President Donald Trump's renewed administration, Texas has emerged as a key frontline in the push for aggressive immigration enforcement and widespread deportations. Texas residents – regardless of immigration status – feel the ripple effects in the economy, schools, healthcare systems, courts and public safety services. To better understand these challenges, KXAN spent the first 100 days of Trump's second term producing 'Undocumented,' a comprehensive project diving into the real-life consequences of related policies and proposals.
AUSTIN (KXAN) — There are a few, small touches of Venezuela around Diego's family's house in the Houston suburbs. Family photographs capture memories from weddings and events in their home country. A mounted key ring near the door spells out the country's name and is painted yellow, blue, and red – the colors of the flag.
However, when Diego thinks of Venezuela, he said he thinks of two different places. First, he thinks of the country where he was born, raised, attended medical school and became a doctor. He said, eventually, 'that country didn't exist any longer. It didn't exist in every single way possible.'
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In 1999, Venezuelan voters elected President Hugo Chávez to office. According to media reports at the time, Chávez campaigned on a promise to stamp out poverty and began to use a windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars in oil money to fund government-run improvement initiatives, such as public housing and health clinics. The country's constitution and its flag changed. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, reports show a global drop in oil prices – along with accusations of government mismanagement and corruption in the next presidency of Nicolás Maduro – pushed the country into a political and economic crisis that plagues it today. Since then, the United Nations refugee agency reports millions of Venezuelans have fled the country, amid a collapsing economy and a contested election.
'You kind of become, sort of, a foreigner in your own country,' Diego said. He eventually left on a temporary visa in Germany to further his medical training, although he said he always planned to return home to Venezuela. In 2014, he got a call from his father that, he said, changed his life.
'Out of the blue, your dad calls you and tells you, 'Look, I've got to flee because they were going to put me in military prison. I am a terrorist in the eyes of the Venezuelan state,'' Diego said he remembers.
Diego's biological father worked with the political opposition to Chávez and Maduro – a woman named María Corina Machado, who has since become a widely-known political figure.
After the call in 2014, Diego said he wasn't sure what to believe but worried that anyone with connections to his father could potentially be in danger. KXAN investigators chose to omit Diego's surname for this reason.
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At the time, German immigration laws required him to return to his country of origin in order to be considered for a longer stay.
'So, what are you going to do? You know, OK, well, I cannot go back there,' he said. 'There was no place for me to go back to.'
So, Diego said he connected with a relative in the United States and started with a temporary visa, before applying for asylum. Then, he said he waited to present his case to the U.S. government. As of April 2025, he said he was still waiting for an outcome.
Diego is one of more than a million people nationwide seeking asylum and waiting, sometimes for years, for their cases to be processed.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association reports a roughly six-year wait time for the processing of an affirmative asylum – where the applicant is seeking protection and the government is not pursuing a removal case against them. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, processes these cases.
According to the same association, people are waiting more than four years for a defensive asylum claim – meaning the government has initiated removal proceedings against them and their cases have landed in immigration court. In fiscal year 2024, the Executive Office for Immigration Review – the branch of the Department of Justice responsible for adjudicating immigration cases – reported nearly 1.5 million pending asylum cases nationwide.
Laura Flores-Dixit is a managing attorney at American Gateways, which represents low-income, immigrant communities in Central Texas. She said long wait times do impact people's cases.
'It's very possible that the information and that the evidence in their case has grown stale. It's also possible that there could be changed circumstances in their country of origin,' Flores-Dixit said. 'However, at this point, they've now established their lives here and have been living here for a decade, right?'
A line graph showing the number of cases pending in immigration court each year. The graphs reveals the backlog in courts across the country, in Texas and in the San Antonio over time. This graph was created using data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan and independent research organization specializing in data collection and analysis on federal enforcement, staffing, and spending. (KXAN Interactive/Christopher Adams)
She said the backlog of cases for people seeking asylum or other legal protections against removal has been growing for nearly a decade – her entire career as an immigration attorney.
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In 2015, U.S. immigration courts faced just under a half-million pending cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse – a non-profit organization at Syracuse University collecting and analyzing government records.
By 2024, TRAC reported a record-high of more than 3.7 million pending cases.
As of March 2025, the backlog had dropped just a bit, to around 3.6 million.
Texas has the second-largest backlog in the country, after Florida, at around 465,000 cases pending this year.
Flores-Dixit said cases from the Central Texas area seem to be moving more quickly through San Antonio's immigration court, which handles most cases from the Central Texas region. TRAC reports around 116,000 pending cases in this particular court this year.
However, she said American Gateways is concerned about a growing backlog at an immigration court about 60 miles southwest of San Antonio. The Pearsall immigration court now processes cases of people held at several immigration detention centers in the area.
'We're talking about people who have been detained at times for six and nine months without even ever having a preliminary hearing,' Flores-Dixit said. She noted that they are seeing a rise in detained individuals asking to 'self-deport.'
'These are people who may have been living here for a significant amount of time, but because they have no criminal history — have no experience in being incarcerated, which is what this truly is — prefer to simply leave, as opposed to fighting their day in court,' she told KXAN.
As the court backlog climbed to that record-high in 2024, President Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of 'making America safe again' and launching the 'largest deportation program in American history.'
Within days of being inaugurated, he signed the Laken Riley Act into law, requiring federal detention for undocumented migrants accused of theft, burglary and any crime that causes death or serious bodily injury.
By February, his Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem released a global ad campaign warning migrants to 'self-deport.'
'If you are here illegally, we will find you and deport you. You will never return. But if you leave now, you may have an opportunity to return and enjoy our freedom and live the American Dream,' Noem said in the video.
Last week, the Trump administration annouced it would help pay up to $1,000 for travel costs to immigrants who self-deport. Migrant advocates told Border Report those considering doing so should consult with an immigration lawyer.
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According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico have fallen sharply in recent months.
For perspective, from late 2021 to the end of 2024, the Biden administration had a monthly average of almost 187,000 encounters — 94% more than the around 11,000 monthly average in Trump's first two months back in office.
During Trump's first term, illegal immigration at the southern border dropped sharply after he entered office – similar to the start of his second term – according to Border Patrol data. It then began to rise steadily, month after month, dropped during the pandemic and actually rose again in the months before he left office.
It's unclear how this latest decrease will impact the backlog in the immigration system and the courts. Sheriffs and other experienced border law enforcement told KXAN there are a lot of factors to consider.
'We're just in the first 100 days, so we've got a lot of wait-and-see,' said retired Sheriff Clint McDonald.
McDonald used to work directly on the border and has 42 years of law enforcement experience. He now serves as the executive director of both the Southwest Border Sheriff's Coalition and the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition.
'The immigration problem will not be fixed overnight,' McDonald said. 'It's never been worked on. Every administration has kicked it on down the road to let somebody else worry about. It's going to take both houses of Congress and the White House to fix the immigration problem.'
Austin immigration attorney Mark Kinzler said this increased focus on deportations has his current – and even past clients – worried about their status at 'levels we've never seen before.'
Inside his immigration law office, children's books and toys fill the lobby, while a corkboard with photos and motivational quotes hangs on the wall. Kinzler said his attorneys try to give their clients a sense of clarity, but he shared it's often difficult to predict how quickly or slowly a case will move. He noted that it can depend on the judge or docket where a case lands.
'So, I have people waiting 10 years, and also people are going to go next week,' he said. 'There's no real rhyme or reason to it.'
Kinzler described some clients as being caught in 'limbo,' waiting for the government to file a specific document to send their case to immigration court or move it forward. He added that the federal government's changing policy decisions can also affect the pace of his cases.
'It's very Kafka-esque, right?'
An April memo from DOJ officials laid out a plan to fast-track cases in immigration court by allowing judges to drop certain asylum cases without a hearing. The memo said 'adjudicators are not prohibited from taking — and, in fact, should take — all appropriate action to immediately resolve cases on their dockets that do not have viable legal paths for relief or protection from removal.'
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The push to clear the dockets comes as some immigration courts across the country face vacancies.
A study by the Congressional Research Service in 2023 showed it would take an additional 700 judges to clear the backlog by 2032 – essentially double the number of judges already working in the system.
During the president's first few months in office, the Trump administration reportedly fired more than a dozen immigration judges and court staff.
'We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,' the president posted on his social media site Truth Social on April 22. 'We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do.'
The comments were a part of a longer post from the president critiquing the legal hurdles his deportation efforts have faced, including a recent Supreme Court decision temporarily blocking some deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
'My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the U.S. Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn't want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter,' Trump wrote.
In response, leaders with the American Immigration Lawyers Association and other advocacy groups have publicly aired concerns about due process being undermined. Kinzler said the feuding between the executive branch and judicial branch over immigration issues raises larger constitutional questions that have people in his industry concerned.
'What that has created for us is chaos, as far as what we tell our clients. If we don't know what rules the government is following right now, we can't necessarily predict what will happen,' he said.
Jennie Murray, the president of the National Immigration Forum, said polling shows most Americans would prefer a focus on solutions. However, in recent years, she said she believes the fight over immigration – and enforcement at the border, in particular – has been a 'political football' that has prevented any immediate solutions to the backlog or long-term reforms to the system.
The National Immigration Forum describes itself as a group advocating for the value of immigrants in the country by pulling together moderate to conservative faith leaders, law enforcement officials, national security experts and business leaders, 'who all believe, from different for different reasons, that we need to have a balanced and thriving immigration system.'
'We absolutely are first in line, honestly to say, 'Of course, we need to have enforcement. Of course, we need to have security.' Every country should be allowed to secure their borders – to remove violent criminals who don't belong in their communities. So, money does need to be spent on that, and we always have. The last nine administrations, without fail – Republican or Democrat – have put money into that,' she said. 'You can have enforcement, but you also need to have personnel, technology, and then you need to robustly start to update the judicial system.'
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She said the forum would like to see a 'more balanced spend' when it comes to immigration — meaning some money could be diverted from enforcement to be used instead for personnel, technology and immigration judges or asylum officers.
Murray explained the asylum system was not intended to process the amount of people seeking protection and safety in the United States as we have seen in recent years.
'We needed to overhaul our system, and we didn't. We are still awaiting decades-long updates that we still need Congress to act on. So that's one main thing: we had a humanitarian need that we weren't ready to meet,' Murray said.
Murray emphasized that the Forum works to make people aware of the profound impact migrants have on our economies and our communities.
'We need to be able to speed things up so that we can have a more efficient and humane process,' she said.
Flores-Dixit with American Gateways agreed that more money needs to be spent on upgrading the system and hiring personnel to clear the backlogs, and she added other 'creative solutions' would be necessary for comprehensive reform.
'As we continue to, you know, shift resources towards processing — that doesn't fix the underlying issue, which is that the immigration system and the laws on the books are broken and do not reflect the current needs and demographics of the United States,' she said.
Diego told KXAN investigators he knows his case is complicated. At one point, he said left the U.S. to return to Europe for an opportunity to further his medical career. Plus, he has also been watching to see whether he may continue to benefit from a protection known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, it may designate people from certain foreign countries eligible for TPS due to ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, an epidemic, or another set of extraordinary and temporary conditions preventing the country's nationals from returning safely. As of a September 2024 report, nearly 350,000 Venezuelans benefited from TPS, and Texas reported the second-largest number of TPS recipients living in the state, after Florida.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced plans to revoke this status for many Venezuelans, meaning they would no longer have temporary protection from deportation or access to work permits.
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DHS, in part, cited a 'strong consideration to the serious national security, border enforcement, public safety, immigration policy, and economic and public welfare concerns engendered by illegal immigration of Venezuelans.'
However, in March, a federal judge paused this plan, saying the government had failed to identify any 'real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries.'
As for Diego, he said he would like to practice medicine again someday. He's been working in the insurance field in the meantime and tries to keep a positive outlook about the future. He told us he believes the United States is a great country and understands the system takes time.
He told us he believes the wait will be worth it.
'I just like to think that this is going to pass, and I just need to hold on – hold tight, very tight,' he said. 'And when the storm passes, I believe, well – perhaps not me, but my children, my grandchildren – are going to profit from something that is great, and it's achievable for them.'
KXAN Digital Data Reporter Christopher Adams, Photojournalist Jordan Belt, Graphic Artist Wendy Gonzalez, Director of Investigations & Innovation Josh Hinkle, Photojournalist Tim Holcomb, Digital Special Projects Developer Robert Sims, Digital Director Kate Winkle and WFLA Bilingual Digital Producer José Acevedo Negrón contributed to this report.
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