Honolulu鈥檚 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 Hawai驶i 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 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 Executive Office for Immigration Review does not comment on third-party reporting of , said press secretary Kathryn Mattingly.
New immigration cases in Hawai驶i began overwhelming completed cases during the in 2020 and 2021 and, according to Maui attorney Kevin Block, 鈥渢here 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.鈥�
The backlog in Honolulu immigration cases doubled from 568 in the 2023 fiscal year to 1,162 in the 2024 fiscal year, he said 鈥� 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 based at Syracuse University.
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 鈥� 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鈥檛 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 鈥渟ome of the methods cause concern with regard to due process.鈥�
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. 鈥淓veryone who is an immigration lawyer in Hawai驶i has had their cases moved up,鈥� 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.
鈥淭his could be a person that鈥檚 been waiting for two or three years, who may have two or three witnesses and has a complicated case history,鈥� 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鈥檚 a possibility of future persecution.
鈥淛amming it into a two-hour slot just feels like you鈥檙e rushing through due process rather than really giving people their day in court,鈥� 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鈥檚 unclear how many of those orders have been applied to cases in Hawai驶i.
Despite the federal policy changes, the most recent data on deportations from Hawai驶i 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鈥檚 home address in Hawai驶i 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 O驶ahu to confer with them, he said, assuming they have the money to retain one in the first place.
Honolulu鈥檚 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鈥檚 immigration courts has been amplified by a decline in the number of immigration judges from 735 to 557 at the end of last year 鈥� 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.
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