The Justice Department under President Donald Trump is buckling, according to a new report from The Hill, as its caseload explodes to “unprecedented” levels while its staffing has “plummeted.”
In the report, published Monday morning, The Hill cited “internal DOJ metrics” that it was able to obtain, showing that the caseloads related to immigrants awaiting deportation and “other Trump administration immigration policies” have led “to record highs” in the number of cases landing at the agency. This comes at a time when the DOJ is also suffering from major staffing shortfalls, on account of both DOGE purges and staffers quitting in droves.
“But that dynamic was particularly pronounced in the civil division’s Office of Immigration Litigation (OIL), which has lost nearly 80 attorneys as workload has jumped 63 percent,” The Hill detailed.
OIL’s staff was around 320 attorneys at the start of Trump’s second term, but was down to 243 by this August. Meanwhile, its caseload has shot up from roughly 7,700 to nearly 9,500, with the report noting that, “There are multiple factors at play behind the surge.”
“I think there are two big drivers,” Margy O’Herron, who previously worked in the deputy attorney general’s office during the Biden administration and oversaw immigration cases, explained to the outlet. “OIL represents the government in cases where the Board [of Immigration Appeals] denies asylum.”
Asylum approvals, meanwhile, are now at a “historic low,” O’Herron added.
In addition, the administration’s decision to “cut off bond hearings for migrants” has prompted a massive influx of “habeas petitions from migrants demanding the government justify why they are being held.”
“The habeas cases have grown significantly, because the administration has begun detaining people who have no criminal history, have been in the country for a long time, and would not have been detained under prior administrations. Now they’re holding them in immigration jails,” O’Herron explained further.
“There may also be another wave of new cases coming that would not be reflected in the data obtained by The Hill: the Trump administration’s effort to boost denaturalizations,” the report continued. “The DOJ boasted Monday that it had filed 40 denaturalization cases, calling it ‘the largest volume of complaints submitted in a single period under the Trump administration,’ from late August to early October.”
One anonymous source, a former OIL staffer, told The Hill that staffers were given a goal of filing 300 of these denaturalization cases.
“It’s not just OIL; the DOJ has been bleeding staff across its civil division as waves of attorneys have left the department,” the report added. “But the Trump administration’s interest in immigration has piled on the workload for the diminished crop of attorneys in that branch. The administration has also remade the immigration courts managed under the DOJ, including the Board of Immigration Appeals — firing and replacing many immigration judges in the system.