Honolulu’s federal immigration court has become increasingly overwhelmed since 2020, with new data showing that the number of cases pending and the wait time for those cases to reach the courts both have hit their highest levels in 15 years.
Those problems, which predate the second Trump administration, have been further tested by a quadrupling of immigration arrests in Hawaiʻi in 2025 compared to 2024.
The pace of arrests was averaging 35 a month last year, then appeared to be tapering off in February, according to the latest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to limit the time allocated in courts for individual hearings in asylum cases, while ramping up requests for removals before hearings can be conducted.
Such policies are designed to close cases faster, DHS says, and so far the strategies have led to 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.
In a social media post on April 4, the department said that immigration courts were on track this fiscal year to surpass the historic number of cases closed in FY2025. The department did not respond to an email request for comment on the backlog.
The average days waiting to appear in Honolulu Immigration Court reached an historic high in March 2026 of 19 months. The number of pending cases, 1,413, was also a 15-year high. (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse/2026)
New immigration cases in Hawaiʻi began overwhelming completed cases during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and, according to Maui attorney Kevin Block, “there was also a surge of unaccompanied minors and other types of cases in 2023 and 2024. So it was after Covid, but before the second Trump administration.”
The backlog in Honolulu immigration cases doubled from 568 in the 2023 fiscal year to 1,162 in the 2024 fiscal year, he said — cases that are still making their way through the courts.
The backlog of pending immigration cases is now at its highest rate in 15 years, with 1,413 cases reported as of March 2026, according to new data obtained from the Department of Homeland Security, which was released on May 6 by an immigration tracking project based at Syracuse University.
Data Dives are Civil Beat’s quick takes on numbers and data sets with a Hawai‘i angle.
With three months left in this fiscal year, that backlog is virtually the same as the total for the entire 2025 fiscal year.
The average waiting time for a case to appear in Honolulu immigration court is now 19 months — four months longer than for the 2025 fiscal year, also the highest in 15 years.
The delays include all immigration-related charges and measure the time the average case has been pending since it first was opened. It doesn’t reflect the additional time it will take for the matter to be resolved once it gets to court.
On its face the DHS strategies make sense, but Block said Friday “some of the methods cause concern with regard to due process.”
The Department of Homeland Security has implemented policies to shrink the nation’s massive immigration court case backlog, including having judges dismiss claims before a full hearing and cutting the time devoted to individual case hearings. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2026)
Block was recently notified by the Honolulu immigration court that 15 trials he had scheduled for 2028 were being brought forward on the calendar into the next six months to a year. “Everyone who is an immigration lawyer in Hawaiʻi has had their cases moved up,” he said.
That apparent effort to address the backlog was being achieved by cutting what used to be full-day hearings into a maximum of two hours per case, Block 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 said. The court needs time to consider country conditions and multiple elements of an asylum claim, he said, as well as whether there was past persecution, and whether there’s a possibility of future persecution.
“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,” he said.
Block said that the government was also making more requests to immigration judges to terminate cases before they receive a full hearing, a process called pretermission. That can result in deportation to one of the countries that has an Asylum Cooperation Agreement with the United States, including Libya, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras.
A total of 48,000 pretermission motions for removal were issued by DHS in March, twice the number issued in March of 2025. It’s unclear how many of those orders have been applied to cases in Hawaiʻi.
Despite the federal policy changes, the most recent data on deportations from Hawaiʻi appears to show they are on par with the last fiscal year, when 220 people were removed. In the 2026 fiscal year to date there have been 153 deportations.
New DHS data also breaks down the distribution of pending cases by the immigrant’s home address in Hawaiʻi by county subdivision. The data also show the percentage of people in these subdivisions who have legal representation for pending cases. Rates of representation vary depending on location but in urbanized areas like Honolulu, around 93% of immigrants are represented.
But there are also pockets, particularly in rural areas such as South Kona, were only nine of the 18 individuals have legal representation. The average percentage of immigration cases with representation across the state is 70%.
Block said that a change in DHS policies on detaining more people who are waiting to have their cases determined is making it harder for them to get representation.
The state has a limited number of immigration attorneys and if someone is detained in FDC Honolulu, their lawyer may have to travel to Oʻahu to confer with them, he said, assuming they have the money to retain one in the first place.
Honolulu’s federal detention center, which is now being used to house detainees arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has seen an increase from an average of 15 per day last February to 73 per day at the start of April.
The simmering crisis in the country’s immigration courts has been amplified by a decline in the number of immigration judges from 735 to 557 at the end of last year — some after being fired by the Trump administration. Honolulu currently has two immigration judges.
The firings could end up backfiring on DHS plans to accelerate hearings, as the additional caseload for judges also results in additional waiting time, according to analysis by TRAC Reports.
“Data Dive” is supported in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.
Sign up for our FREE morning newsletter and face each day more informed.
Sign Up
Sorry. That’s an invalid e-mail.
Thanks! We’ll send you a confirmation e-mail shortly.