Backlog leaves detainees waiting an average of 19 months for their day in Honolulu court
Honolulu’s federal immigration court has become increasingly overwhelmed since 2020, and the backlog has now reached its highest level in 15 years, according to data cited by an immigration tracking project based at Syracuse University. The average wait for a case to reach the Honolulu immigration court is now 19 months, which is four months longer than the 2025 fiscal year, also described as the highest in 15 years.
The new figures show that Honolulu’s pending cases stood at 1,413 as of March 2026. With three months left in the fiscal year, the pending backlog is described as virtually the same as the total for the entire 2025 fiscal year. The delays, the reporting notes, reflect the time from when a case is first opened until it appears on the court’s calendar, not the additional time needed to resolve the case after it reaches court.
Lawyers and immigration advocates point to pressure on the system from both increased enforcement and capacity constraints. The reporting said arrests in Hawaii in 2025 have quadrupled compared with 2024, after averaging 35 a month in 2024 and appearing to taper off in February, based on data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
While DHS has sought to accelerate case outcomes, the reporting said policies have also contributed to due-process concerns raised by attorneys. The Department of Homeland Security is moving to limit the time allocated in court for individual hearings in asylum cases, while also increasing requests for removals before hearings can be conducted. DHS said such strategies are designed to close cases faster, and the reporting said DHS’s approach has been accompanied by a reduction in the national immigration case backlog from 3.7 million at the start of the Trump administration to 3.3 million in March.
The system’s burden is further strained by limited judge availability in Honolulu. The reporting said the number of immigration judges has declined nationally from 735 to 557 by the end of last year, with some judges after being fired during the Trump administration, and that Honolulu currently has two immigration judges. It said analysis by TRAC Reports suggests the firings could backfire on DHS plans to accelerate hearings because additional caseload for judges produces additional waiting time.
Kevin Block, a Maui attorney, said the Honolulu immigration court has been bringing trials forward to address the backlog. He said “Everyone who is an immigration lawyer in Hawaiʻi has had their cases moved up,” describing a change in which 15 trials scheduled for 2028 were moved forward into the next six months to a year. Block said the approach is being implemented by cutting what used to be full-day hearings into a maximum of two hours per case.
Block argued that the abbreviated scheduling can be at odds with the structure of asylum adjudications. He said, “This could be a person that’s been waiting for two or three years, who may have two or three witnesses and has a complicated case history.” He added that the court needs time to consider country conditions and multiple elements of an asylum claim, including questions about past persecution and the possibility of future persecution, and said, “Jamming it into a two-hour slot just feels like you’re rushing through due process rather than really giving people their day in court.”
The reporting also said DHS is making more requests for immigration judges to terminate cases before they receive a full hearing, a process called pretermission. It said a total of 48,000 pretermission motions for removal were issued by DHS in March—twice the number in March of 2025—and that it is unclear how many of those orders have been applied in Hawaiʻi. It described one outcome of pretermission as deportation to countries with an Asylum Cooperation Agreement with the United States, naming Libya, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras.
DHS changes also appear to be affecting access to legal representation, the reporting said. It said new DHS data breaks down pending cases in Hawaiʻi by county subdivision and shows differing rates of representation depending on location. In Honolulu, around 93% of immigrants are represented in pending cases, while in rural areas such as South Kona, only nine of the 18 individuals have legal representation, and the statewide average for immigration cases with representation is 70%.
Block said DHS policy changes on detaining more people while they wait for case decisions are making representation harder for some detainees. He said the state’s limited number of immigration attorneys can mean lawyers must travel to Oʻahu to meet detained clients at the Florence detention facility, and that this depends on whether someone has the money to retain counsel in the first place.
In Honolulu, the reporting said the federal detention center used to house detainees arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has seen detainee averages rise from 15 per day last February to 73 per day at the start of April. In social media statements on April 4, DHS said immigration courts were on track to surpass the historic number of cases closed in fiscal year 2025, while the Executive Office for Immigration Review declined to comment on third-party reporting of its data, according to press secretary Kathryn Mattingly.