Asylum seekers living through growing backlog at Kansas and Missouri’s only immigration court

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) – As the November election gets closer, illegal immigration has become a hot-button issue both nationwide as well as locally.

Political ads with many candidates for state and federal offices have made it a cornerstone of their platform. Recently, Missouri lawmakers created a committee whose sole purpose is to investigate crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants.

However, behind every ad and statistic is someone and their family living the asylum process. In many cases for years before they get answers on being able to stay and work or not. Advocates argue the current legal process needs to be reformed in order to function properly so people coming undocumented truly decrease.

Right now, there’s only one immigration court assigned to cover all of Missouri and Kansas immigrant cases. It’s in Kansas City and faces a backlog higher than some lawyers have seen in the more than 20 years they’ve been practicing. As a result, it’s dragging more people through the system for longer periods year after year.

KCTV met a couple of them. Mery Prada and Brenyelis Bracho both fled Venezuela more than three years ago. They told us through a translator they rode on top of trains and hiked through all of Central America to seek asylum in the U.S.

“There are many situations in Venezuala like political violence, food insecurity, and this makes it difficult to provide for your family,” Prada recalled. “The schools there aren’t great.”

“My husband and my two children were all on top of the train together,” Bracho said. “There were 36 cars and filled with people on top. The train just continues, so you go 12 hours without drinking water.”

They’ve both been in America for four months now but Venezuela hasn’t sent them all their IDs, and their documentation expired over the years. The paperwork is needed to seek asylum and obtain other documentation to immigrate to America.

“We haven’t been able to apply yet because my husband doesn’t have a copy of his birth certificate,” Bracho said. “If we’re unable to get his birth certificate, me and my daughters can apply but we’re unable to apply as a family.”

Even if Bracho and Prada do find their papers, Immigration Attorney Michael Sharma-Crawford says they’ll likely wait for at least a few years.

“I was just working on a case yesterday that started in 2012,” Sharma-Crawford said. “The last time I checked the figure of backlogs at the Kansas City Immigration Court was 48,000 cases. And there are more coming in than going out.”

In the Kansas City Immigration Court, only three judges oversee all of cases in both Kansas and Missouri. Attorneys argue the backlog only makes the process harder for people who want to immigrate to the U.S the legal way.

“If you at that point don’t file that application within one year of arrival, you may not be eligible for that work card,” Attorney Sharma-Crawford explained. “But, still waiting for that court date in four years.”

While Kansas and Missouri only have three judges to cover both states, places like Nevada have six judges just for that state and Virginia alone has four courts with 73 judges.

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