There’s a new full-time judge on Utah’s immigration court. It’s now staffed by four judges — one fewer than in the spring of 2025. The case backlog is still in the tens of thousands, but increased staffing could be good news for immigrants who want a quick resolution to their case.
It was a whirlwind year for the court. It lost three judges last summer and later got two temporary judges with military backgrounds. One of them left, and the experienced immigration judge was transferred from a different jurisdiction.
The Trump administration celebrates how fast judges are completing immigration cases. But in Utah, the backlog is still high. As of March, 49,192 cases were pending in the Salt Lake City Immigration Court. That’s down from 50,027 at the end of September, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which obtains Executive Office for Immigration Review records through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Utah cases have been pending for an average of 752 days, a little over two years, according to the clearinghouse. Judges’ calendars are nearly full through 2029, said immigration attorney Adam Crayk, who’s in court almost every day.
It’s hard to say how much slower or faster an experienced judge will finish cases compared to a newer one.
The administration has fired more than 113 immigration judges and hired at least 140, many of whom are temporary and have little immigration experience. The Department of Justice advertises the position as “deportation judge,” rather than immigration judge.
Jeremiah Johnson, executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, was among those fired in November 2025. He said there’s nothing inherently wrong with being new.
The problem, Johnson said, is that new judges receive less training and mentorship than they used to. He also believes those in temporary positions might not be as invested in their work.
Immigration law is often described as the second most complicated type of law, after tax law.
“The judge needs to be able to understand the law, have a command of knowledge of that law,” he said.
Johnson recalled a mentor’s advice that the most important thing was to get cases right, whether that took an hour or four days. It’s a judge’s job to consider all the evidence, he said, and sometimes there’s a lot.
“So if a party submits 300 pages, it's your responsibility to read it all and make a decision based on that,” he said.
While new judges can learn the law, there’s a loss of institutional knowledge on how to handle procedural aspects, he said, which could slow the process down.
In other states, Crayk said he’s recently seen judges speed through cases and rule more harshly than under previous administrations.
But he said Judge Brock Taylor, who was appointed under the first Trump administration and recently worked in an immigration court in New Mexico, and Judge Joseph Q. Andelin, who was appointed in February and previously served as a military lawyer, have taken the time to be thorough and thoughtful with cases.
“Some of these guys have been given the moniker of deportation judges, and in no way, shape or form can I say that about the two new immigration judges we have in Utah,” he said. “With Judge Andelin and Judge Taylor, I have been pleasantly, pleasantly surprised.”
If the two judges who were already on the bench continued at their current pace of completing 202 and 228 cases per month, the current backlog would take 9.6 years to work through. That’s based on KUER’s analysis of data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review obtained by the Deportation Data Project through records requests.
Adding a third who rules at the same average rate brings the time needed to work through cases to 6.4 years.
It’s hard to say how quickly the temporary judge, Joseph Q. Andelin, will complete cases. In the Deportation Data Project dataset, he is listed as finishing 80 cases in February and none in March or April.
Johnson warned against looking too closely at the data because “the people entering it are overworked staff,” but he said it’s good for observing trends.
Speedier processing has its pros and cons for immigrants, Crayk said.
For someone with a strong asylum case, a shorter wait means a quicker path to legal status. But those with weaker claims might see it another way.
“For someone who's been here his entire life or her entire life, and the only remedy they have available for them is asylum, it can be pretty daunting, because they realize that they're going to lose kind of quickly,” Crayk said.
The Utah court completed 25% more cases in fiscal year 2025 than in 2024, but it has slowed so far this year.
A bigger difference than speed is the decline in new cases. There were 5,813 new cases filed in fiscal year 2025, down 78% from the previous year. That’s likely because border encounters are at their lowest in decades, so fewer people are entering the U.S. and seeking asylum.
New cases, Crayk said, are coming from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.
“Lots,” he said. “And ICE has been extremely busy in the last couple of weeks.”
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
Note on methodology: Backlog completion rates are based on how many cases judges David C. Anderson and Christopher M. Greer completed per month at the Salt Lake City Immigration Court in West Valley City from Oct. 1, 2025, through April 30, 2026, based on the case’s completion date and the judge assigned to the case. It only accounts for cases listed with the final court of West Valley. The data comes from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, accessed at https://eoir-removal-cases.apps.deportationdata.org/.
