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Notes -
~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.
Taking the number of illegal immigrants as 8 million (no clue if this is accurate, but I've seen it tossed around a lot recently so just using it for ballpark math), assuming a one-hour hearing for each (longer than I think they usually get but let's be generous with "due process"), standard 8 hour work days, to process them in a single year would take 3000-3500 additional immigration judges, making them the largest group of federal judges by a huge margin if I'm reading the other numbers right.
Annual salary averages somewhere north of 150K, but using that for this lazy math would put this Immigration Judge Year at $450M in salaries. Not a crazy amount looking at DOJ's budget and other program expenses.
Obviously lots of other expenses, hiring them for a single year is a bit absurd, etc etc. Just thought it would be interesting to put some numbers to what a useful increase would look like.
If some country will take them for free. We don't have extra Australias laying around anymore.
Paying other countries to take them without strict imprisonment is also an option that seems to work somewhat for, ha, Australia.
That seems like an extremely low number to me. Why aren't there ten times that number? That's about one immigration judge for every 500,000 people. As you point out, it's not nearly enough to handle the number of cases in a timely manner.
Canada has more judges than this, and we have 1/8 the population of the US.
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