“The immigration courts and the backlog are not a physical border wall, but it is a paper border wall,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at the Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to track immigration court cases. “It’s one of the ways to keep people from participating in society in a full and complete way.”

Because none of Biden’s early executive orders mentions the court backlog, Kocher said he hopes Biden’s proposed immigration bill addresses it.

“Biden has been in office for less than a month, so it is too early to draw conclusions about where the court backlog fits within his priorities,” he said. “The only thing we know for certain is, these 1.3 million people must be taken into account or the integrity and legitimacy of our immigration system will continue to be undermined and mired in dysfunction.”