BOULDER, Colorado — As the city of Denver struggles to help the migrants who come here each day, U.S. immigration courts are backlogged to a new record high.
Three million cases are now pending in the United States. That's according to TRAC, a nonpartisan research center run by Syracuse University. The data shows the backlog in cases rose by a million in a year.
"I would describe it as chaos, and chaos does not help anyone," said Violeta Chapin, associate dean at the University of Colorado's law school and director of CU's immigration clinic. "And what's frustrating is that we're failing to find a way out of the chaos."
The clinic is a program through the law school that provides free legal services for immigrants going through the system, which can be a long and grueling process.
"We've had several asylum cases that I've had to cycle through five, six, seven classes of students. They have to have multiple different lawyers over the course of the years because the cases drag on for just that long," Chapin said.
In Colorado, the backlog of cases jumped from 21,000 in the 2022 fiscal year to more than 46,000 cases in 2023. So far in the 2024 fiscal year, the backlog is up to nearly 57,000 cases.
The case requests for Chapin's clinic won't stop. She said she gets emails daily from people looking to get their case picked up by her team.
"It's certainly doubled for sure, which is plenty," she said. "We just don't have enough resources to process all the people that are coming through the system."
Chapin said she often has a waitlist of students interested in joining her clinic. She hopes they are the push the country needs to fix the system.
"We need people who are willing to think carefully and thoughtfully and are willing to make decisions that are more helpful than harmful," she said.
Chapin believes one of the solutions could be a public defender program specifically for people going through the immigration process. She also hopes to see the waiting period for a work permit be trimmed down so migrants in the legal process can start working shortly after they arrive.
SUGGESTED VIDEOS: Latest from 9NEWS