Honolulu’s federal immigration court is underwater, and the numbers are only getting worse. New figures from the Department of Homeland Security show a backlog that, by March 2026, had reached 1,413 pending cases and an average 19‑month wait for the first time an immigrant sees the inside of the courtroom. Both marks are 15‑year highs and continue a trend that began long before the current administration.
The delays mean that an individual arrested by immigration authorities in Hawaii today may not appear before a judge until late 2027, even before counting the additional months it takes to resolve the case. The backlog in Honolulu has more than doubled since 2023, from 568 pending cases that year to 1,162 in 2024, according to Maui attorney Kevin Block, who attributed the early growth to an influx of unaccompanied minors and other asylum seekers. The pace of arrests, which averaged 35 a month in 2024 and appeared to taper early this year, have been overtaken by a statewide surge that quadrupled arrests in 2025, based on data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
The Department of Homeland Security is trying to move faster. It is encouraging immigration courts to limit hearing time — even complicated asylum cases that would have once consumed a full day are now being squeezed into two‑hour windows. Simultaneously, the agency is filing more pre‑hearing termination requests, called pre‑termination motions, which ask a judge to remove a case from the docket before it ever receives a full hearing. Those motions doubled in March 2026 compared to the same month in 2025, though it is unclear how many affect cases in Hawaii.
Block said the new practices raise due‑process red flags. “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 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 court needs time to weigh country conditions, past persecution, and the possibility of future persecution if an immigrant is deported, he said.
The Trump administration has also fired hundreds of immigration judges across the country, shrinking their ranks from 735 to 557, according to the Transactional Records Accessibility Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. Honolulu, with two judges, is no exception, and the reduction has led the clearinghouse to warn that the additional caseload could further slow proceedings.
The squeeze is hitting immigrants hardest where representation is already thin. Statewide, 70 percent of detainees facing removal are represented, but the rate falls to 50 percent in rural areas such as South Kona. Block said detention itself often makes representation harder: “If somebody is detained in Honolulu, their lawyer may have to travel to Oʻahu, assuming they can retain one in the first place.”
The number of detainees held at Honolulu’s Federal Detention Center jumped from an average of 15 a day in February 2025 to 73 a day by April 2026, the most recent month counted. Meanwhile, the national backlog of immigration cases fell from 3.7 million at the start of the Trump administration to 3.3 million in March, DHS said. Kathryn Mattingly, press secretary for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the courts, said the agency does “not comment on third‑party reporting of EOIR data.”
Block acknowledged the agency’s logic but worried about the consequences. “On its face the DHS strategies make sense, but some of the methods cause concern with regard to due process,” he said. “Everyone who is an immigration lawyer in Hawaiʻi has had their cases moved up. That’s the reality.”