Several weeks ago, the Immigration Court suffered a huge computer crash that took down not only the Court’s automated Hotline, but the Court’s own case software as well. The outage affected the Judge’s ability to schedule cases, the Clerk’s ability to find and retrieve records, and the ability of attorneys to keep track of their client’s cases. Over 360,000 cases were affected.

Immigration attorneys were amazed, not only at the outage, but at the idea that the Department of Justice didn’t maintain a redundant system to prevent outages and to ensure that Immigration Judges can maintain their ability to schedule and docket cases.

Thankfully, the Department of Justice announced today that the systems are back online! But, the computer update doesn’t change that the Immigration Court is flooded by far more cases than they can handle. The Boston Immigration Court has over 9,000 cases pending alone, leaving immigrants no choice but to wait for years and years to have their day in court, present their defenses, and learn the fate of their family members who face deportation.

Read the EOIR (Immigration Court) press release here: EOIR System Update

Read Josh Gerstein’s article about the system outage here: Immigration Court Tech Crash Drags On