How many migrants have come to South Florida in recent years? Court cases provide clue
Miami has long been a destination for immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean and elsewhere. But experts, lawyers and even local officials have said that it’s been difficult to put a number on the new arrivals in South Florida over the past few years.
Now, a research institute at Syracuse University could shed light on those hard-to-pin down statistics. An analysis of Department of Homeland Security data by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows that Miami has the largest total of new deportation cases filed this fiscal year of any immigration courts in the country.
TRAC’s statistics do not include every immigrant who has recently come to the area, and also includes people who have lived here a long time or who live elsewhere but have their court cases in Miami. But the numbers provide useful insights about the influx that reveals how many people are coming and who they are.
Homeland Security filed 70,883 so-called notices to appear for deportation cases in Miami’s immigration court between October 2023, when the federal fiscal year began, and February 2024, according to TRAC. A notice to appear is a document that the agency uses to begin someone’s immigration court proceedings.
“A large number of people coming through ports of entry such as airports or through the border will be put in immigration courts process,” said Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at TRAC.
There were 107,600 notices to appear filed in Miami’s immigration court in fiscal year 2022, according to TRAC’s analysis. In 2023, that was 102,493.
Kocher estimates that the total of notices could even be as high as 170,000 by Sept. 30, which will mark the end of the current fiscal year.
The data “gives us a sense of how many cases are coming in. It’s an important number since it gives us a sense of scale. It tells us something about how many people are facing deportation, the workload of the immigration court system and the immigration judges, and the counties where immigrants are living to get a sense of the geographic distribution of these cases,” Kocher said.
So far this year, more than 33,000 people with new notices to appear for deportation cases in all immigration courts have listed Miami-Dade County as their home, according to mailing address zip codes in court records that TRAC analyzed. Just over 32,000 have had their cases filed in Miami.
After “not known,” Miami-Dade is the top listed county in immigrant’s addresses this year. Another 21,000 people who received notices to appear dated in 2024 listed their home as Palm Beach and Broward counties.
The deportation cases filed in 2024 in Miami’s immigration court also reflect South Florida’s demographics: Over half involved Cuban and Haitians. The other top nationalities so far this year: Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans and Colombians.
There are three federal immigration courts in Florida. One is in Downtown Miami. Another is located some 20 miles west at the Krome Detention Center, where federal judges oversee detained immigrants’ cases; the third is in Orlando.
After Texas, Florida is the second state with the highest number of notices to appear in the current fiscal year, highlighting that the state continues to be a magnet for immigrants.
The new deportation cases in Miami’s immigration system raises questions about how judges and court staff will handle the gargantuan volume of cases.
There was a nationwide backlog of 3.43 million immigration cases through February 2024, according to TRAC. Some asylum seekers have told the Herald that their first court hearings are scheduled several years into the future. Others haven’t received a court date at all.
Miami’s court has the largest backlog of them all, with over 291,000 cases. The new proceedings filed this year will likely strain an already fraught and under-resourced legal system which doesn’t have enough judges to resolve all cases in a timely manner.
