Honolulu Immigration Court Wait Times Reach 19 Months

Honolulu’s federal immigration court has seen its pending caseload and average wait times reach 15-year highs. New data show the average wait to appear in court reached 19 months in March 2026, four months longer than the prior fiscal year. The number of pending cases stood at 1,413 as of March.

Those figures come as the Department of Homeland Security has limited the time allocated for individual asylum hearings and increased requests for removal orders before full hearings occur. The department said the changes are intended to close cases faster.

Nationally, the immigration court backlog fell from 3.7 million cases at the start of the Trump administration to 3.3 million in March. In a social media post on April 4, the department said immigration courts were on track this fiscal year to surpass the number of cases closed in fiscal 2025.

The department did not respond to a request for comment.

New immigration cases in Hawaii began exceeding completed cases during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. A Maui attorney said there was also a surge of unaccompanied minors and other cases in 2023 and 2024. The backlog in Honolulu roughly doubled from 568 cases in fiscal 2023 to 1,162 in fiscal 2024.

Immigration arrests in Hawaii quadrupled in 2025 compared with 2024, averaging 35 per month last year before appearing to taper in February. The problems predate the second Trump administration. With three months left in the current fiscal year, the backlog is nearly the same as the total for all of fiscal 2025.

A Maui attorney said the Department of Homeland Security has cut what used to be full-day hearings to a maximum of two hours per case. The attorney was recently notified that 15 trials scheduled for 2028 had been moved forward into the next six to 12 months.

The attorney said every immigration lawyer in Hawaii has had cases moved up. "Jamming it into a two-hour slot just feels like you’re rushing through due process rather than really giving people their day in court," the attorney said. The changes include more frequent requests to terminate cases before a full hearing, known as pretermission.

In March the department issued 48,000 such motions nationally, twice the number from March 2025. Cases sent for removal under these orders can result in deportation to countries that have agreements with the United States. The average wait time measures the period since a case was opened and does not include additional time needed once it reaches court.