The stack of cases at Texas' overburdened immigration courts grew by nearly 60 percent since October 2013, bringing the state's pending cases to a record high of nearly 77,000, making it the largest backlog in the country after California.

Nationwide it now takes an average of 604 days to process an immigration case, according to an analysis of federal data through April by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In Houston, where the pending case load grew by 13 percent from late 2013 to nearly 32,000 so far this year, the highest in the state, the delay is 636 days.

The long overburdened and underfunded immigration court system has been further overwhelmed by the influx of more than 67,000 unaccompanied Central American children who streamed across the Southwest border in 2014. In response, the Obama administration prioritized their cases and those of other migrants who arrived here last year to deter more from coming.

But that has only exacerbated the wait time for any other immigration cases, especially those from Mexico, who still make up the majority of the caseload. All cases stemming from before 2014 are now being reset for 2019.

"Soon we'll be seeing them reset for 2020," said Raed Gonzalez, an immigration attorney in Houston. "We're freaking out. I've never seen it this bad."

Among the top five nationalities with their cases pending in immigration courts, the number of Hondurans grew the most, jumping 143 percent from October 2013 to more than 57,600 as of April. The number of Salvadorans and Guatemalans also skyrocketed. The three Central American countries were the principal drivers of the surge of children and young families who arrived here last year, many of them fleeing violence and poverty.

Lack of funding

The bottleneck stems from at least a decade of under-funding the court system while budgets for the two immigrant enforcement agencies soared. Funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection grew by 300 percent since 2002 to $18 billion in 2013, according to a 2014 study by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., studying immigration policy.

Meanwhile, the budget for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts, increased by about 70 percent to $304 million.

"It's very distressing. The problem just continues to get worse and while there's so much funding placed towards different types of immigration enforcement, there's not similar funding for the courts," said Julie Myers Wood, a security consultant who headed ICE between 2006-2008. "You can't have a secure border if you don't have a functioning immigration court system."

As the courts face their greatest backlog ever, total apprehensions at the Southwest border during the first six months of fiscal year 2015 were nearly a third lower than during the same period in 2014, and the lowest in the last four fiscal years, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Giant caseloads

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, who heads the National Association of Immigration Judges, estimates about 212 judges are currently hearing cases full time. Under the current backlog, that means each of them could be juggling an average case load of as much as 2,100 compared to federal district court judges who average about 440. The association is asking for Congress to fund at least 100 new judges in the next budget cycle, but even that would only be a temporary stopgap, Marks said.

Human Rights First, a national human rights group with offices in Houston, on Friday called for Congress to address the issue, saying it could "undermine the integrity of the overall system."

The organization has said 280 judges are needed to reduce the backlog. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, in March requested funding for 55 new judges, which a House appropriations subcommittee approved this week.

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