Texas Tech immigration judge warns of court backlog, due-process strain

The immigration court system entered spring with 3,318,099 active cases on its books, and 2,322,671 of them involved people who had already filed formal asylum applications. That backlog has turned Daniel Caudillo, a former immigration judge and now director of the Jim and Leah Finley Immigration Law Clinic at Texas Tech University School of Law, into a prominent voice on a system that is straining under both volume and instability.

Caudillo knows the court from the inside. He served as a United States immigration judge in Laredo, Texas, after being appointed in October 2021, and Texas Tech says he brings more than 17 years of immigration law experience to the clinic. His path to that role began in Odessa, Texas, where he was born to Mexican immigrants, then continued through Permian High School, Texas Tech University, and Texas Tech University School of Law, where he earned his degrees in 2003 and 2007.

His warning comes as the judge corps itself has been shaken. Recent reporting and legal-advocacy statements say the Trump administration has fired, forced out or seen the departure of more than 200 immigration judges over roughly the past 14 months. The National Association of Immigration Judges said 113 judges had been fired since January 2025 without due process, cause or explanation. That kind of turnover matters because immigration judges are not part of the judicial branch; the immigration court system sits under the Department of Justice, leaving the bench exposed to executive-branch management decisions.

That structure is central to the current fight over due process. The American Bar Association has said immigration judges must be free to decide cases based on the facts and the law, not outside pressure. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has backed the Real Courts, Rule of Law Act of 2026, a proposal aimed at creating a more independent immigration court system. Advocates say the issue is not just speed, but whether a system with millions of pending cases can still deliver consistent rulings, adequate hearing time and confidence that outcomes are not being shaped by politics.

The stakes are heightened by the nature of the caseload itself. More than 2.3 million pending asylum cases mean many people are asking the court to decide whether they face danger if sent back to their home countries. In that setting, turnover on the bench can delay hearings, interrupt continuity and make it harder for litigants and lawyers to know how cases will be handled from one judge to the next. Caudillo’s perspective, as both a former judge and a clinic director training the next generation of immigration lawyers, puts him at the center of a broader legal reckoning over whether the nation’s immigration courts can still function with fairness while carrying a historic backlog.