CHICAGO (AP) — Statistics show Chicago’s immigration court now has the second-longest average time to dispose of a case in the U.S. due to a spike in pending cases and the complexity of some of them.
National data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show the average wait time for a case to be processed in Chicago’s immigration court increased from less than 750 days in 2014 to more than 1,000 days at the end of fiscal 2017.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the latest figure has pushed Illinois to second among all states in lag times, only behind Colorado.
Court officials say Chicago’s court had more than 25,000 pending cases in its system at the end of fiscal 2017.
A spokeswoman for the court says complex cases can also explain the slow process.
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