“If every person with a pending immigration case were gathered together, it would be larger than the population of Philadelphia, the sixth-largest city in the United States,” Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at TRAC, said in a statement.

“These findings suggest that the immigration courts are entering a worrying new era of even more crushing caseloads — all the more concerning since no attempt at a solution has yet been able to reverse the avalanche of cases that immigration judges now face,” Kocher said.