In reporting our editorial immigration series last year, we were repeatedly struck by how slow the federal immigration court system worked.

Basically, it doesn’t.

The average wait time for an immigration hearing for someone accused of entering or being in our country illegally is 900 days, or 2.5 years. Cases are so backed up that defendants incur delays of months and sometimes years. That’s plenty of time for a released defendant to get established in society and accept the risk of not appearing in court to avoid a possible deportation sentence.

The problem comes down to a mathematical one: There are simply not enough immigration judges or courts in our nation to handle the hundreds of thousands of pending cases.

In fact, there are only 59 federal immigration courts in the country and 241 immigration judges, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), an arm of the Department of Justice that oversees immigration courts, told us.

In November, we spent several days in Harlingen observing federal immigration case proceedings there for the third part in our series of editorials about the surge of illegal immigrants to our region and its impact on our society and our country. The only federal immigration courts in South Texas are located in Harlingen and Port Isabel.

We concluded that the bottleneck in our immigration system stems from an overburdened, understaffed U.S. federal immigration court system currently in place.

Therefore, we are delighted to learn in recent private conversations with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who sits on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, that he is working earnestly with lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to appropriate millions more dollars toward beefing up federal immigration courts.

In a phone interview on Thursday morning, Cuellar told The Monitor editorial board that he has proposed to increase by $124 million the budget for EOIR, which would specifically add 55 new immigration judges and 28 additional immigration appeal attorneys. That would significantly increase the EOIR budget for fiscal 2016, up from $347.2 million in fiscal year 2015.

Cuellar also told us that he believes these judges and attorneys should be located on the border, such as South Texas, which has been the epicenter for immigration this past year.

“The judges are the most important part of this process,” Cuellar told us. “We need to prioritize and put them at the border.”

Cuellar has suggested hiring judges from a crop of recently retired judges, magistrate judges and attorneys who are experienced in immigration law.

As for the infrastructure needed to house these additional courts, in the short term, Cuellar told us “hopefully we can work with local governments where we can borrow some of their courtrooms. But eventually we’ll have to build courtrooms.”

His is a common-sense and most rational suggestion.

His proposal makes sense on so many levels and economically could save our country millions of dollars. Here’s why:

The thousands of immigrants who are here illegally are being housed in federal facilities. The Department of Homeland Security oversees apprehended family units, which consist of children and adults accused of being here illegally. Meanwhile, unaccompanied alien children (called UACs), are cared for by the Health and Human Services Department. The average holding time for UACs in HHS detention facilities currently is about 35 days. Then the children are typically transferred to federally-monitored homes or special group facilities, we were told recently by an HHS representative who spoke during a South Texas College two-day conference on human trafficking and immigration issues held last month in McAllen. They await there until their immigration court hearings, but all this waiting ultimately costs U.S. taxpayers money.

And so this glacially slow pace for federal immigration hearings has had a costly domino effect on our society that has trickled down and resulted in additional money spent on housing and care.

This bottleneck needs to stop and adding nearly one-fifth more immigration judges through Cuellar’s plan could help to do just that.

Aside from the cost, there also is a moral issue. We do not believe that justice delayed is justice served. Although one is deemed guilty in immigration court once it has been established the person entered the country illegally or without proper documents, nevertheless the defendants should not have to wait an obscene amount of time for adjudication of their cases — especially if they are young children.

Cuellar candidly shared with us that several of his colleagues in Washington (and many in Texas) believe that money put to the border should all be geared toward security. And he says he has a hard time convincing them that other methods, such as adding federal immigration judges, could help this politically-charged issue.

“A lot of my colleagues want to put more money on Border Patrol and law enforcement but they forget there is a ripple effect. If you have more agents then you catch more people and then you need more judges and prosecutors and attorneys,” Cuellar said. “If you have to wait two and a half years for court, that’s just incredible.”

We applaud the congressman’s candor and honesty and his knowledge and concern for this issue that so greatly affects our Rio Grande Valley. We hope that others on the Appropriations Committee will heed his advice and will approve these additional funds for more judges in fiscal year 2016, which begins in October.

We believe that would be money well spent.

http://www.themonitor.com/opinion/editorial-more-us-immigration-judges-needed/article_1aed2194-dfe5-11e4-af39-47dff4009261.html