More deportations at Charlotte’s immigration court aren’t denting a huge backlog
More people were ordered removed from the country in Charlotte’s immigration court last year, but that hardly affected a sizable case backlog, according to data reviewed by The Charlotte Observer.
The data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse tool — or TRAC — says about 22,000 people on the docket in Charlotte were ordered removed from the United States in 2025. About 14,000 were ordered for removal the year before.
Voluntary departures increased, too. In 2024, just 167 people chose to leave the United States; last year, 799 people made that choice.
Judges at the small immigration court, discreetly tucked into a building on Executive Center Drive, hear cases from both North Carolina and South Carolina.
Even before a busy year for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Queen City and a controversial, weeklong U.S. Border Patrol operation, the court had well above 100,000 pending cases.
That has not changed.
After a record high of 145,000 cases pending in the 2024 Fiscal Year, the number dipped slightly. Over 132,000 cases were pending in Fiscal Year 2025. Today, there are 126,000, according to TRAC’s numbers.
Charlotte has the ninth most backlogged immigration court in the United States — larger than Tennessee’s and Virginia’s, for example, but smaller than backlogs in Florida, Texas or California.
While politicians often talk about immigration enforcement, attorneys have long called for Congress to pour more resources into the accompanying court system.
Those courts also lack the independence most have; judges work for the federal Department of Justice, under the executive branch.
Pulling from different data, the Observer previously reported that ICE arrests in Charlotte and North Carolina ramped up dramatically after President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Many people arrested by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Charlotte last year reported that they were taken to a different court in Georgia.
Ryan Oehrli covers criminal justice in the Charlotte region for The Charlotte Observer. His work is produced with financial support from the nonprofit The Just Trust. The Observer maintains full editorial control of its journalism.