Florida, the state with the highest number of pending immigration cases in the US

Florida is the state with the highest number of pending immigration cases in the country, according to researchers at Syracuse University in New York, which released a report in December 2024, collected 51 Telemundo.

According to the study, Florida led with a total of 567.226 pending cases, followed by Texas with 490.004 cases, and California with 405.230 unresolved cases.

However, for local lawyers the results of this investigation do not seem to come as a surprise. Eduardo Soto, who usually handles immigration cases in South Florida, said that he was not surprised by these figures.

"The number of judges we have cannot have enough hours in the day to deal with the population," said Willy Allen, another immigration lawyer in Miami.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, who works at the nonpartisan Immigration Policy Institute, also said that "there are not enough immigration judges to try all these cases, so they simply cannot handle the volume of cases that are coming in."

Bush-Joseph said the long backlog means people who deserve asylum protection are waiting years to receive it, while others who are not eligible are allowed to stay in the United States longer.

"This is all because the US immigration system in general is extremely outdated, overwhelmed and under-resourced," he added.

And Florida appears to be in a much worse situation, seeing an increase of approximately 350% in pending cases going through immigration courts over a four-year period.

Attorney Eduardo Soto believes the problem behind this increase is closely linked to the number of people who have entered the country in recent years.

Meanwhile, James Fujimoto, who served as an immigration judge for decades, said, “It’s hard to put it into perspective when you really think about it because, essentially, each immigration judge is being tasked with 4,000 or 5,000 cases.”