US Courts Near Southern Border Prep for Immigration Case Spike

Federal district courts near the southwest border are bracing for a potential increase in cases, as the Trump administration pledges to prioritize immigration enforcement over other criminal matters.

Chief judges of trial courts in southern Texas and California said preparations include working to ensure they have space available to process more defendants and interpreters on-call and closely monitoring border numbers.

But as migration numbers stay relatively low, they said they are taking a wait-and-see approach to their dockets.

“We’re sort of holding our breath and waiting to see what happens,” said Chief Judge Cynthia Bashant of the US District Court for the Southern District of California, based in San Diego.

After Donald Trump won reelection, there was an expectation that he might reinstate the policies of his first administration, which resulted in a surge of border crossing cases that overwhelmed dockets, said Chief Judge Randy Crane of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas, which is headquartered in Houston. Courts near the border were suddenly inundated with immigration cases after the US implemented a “zero-tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings in 2017 and 2018.

Immigration cases in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas saw a more than 40% jump in defendants charged with immigration offenses between fiscal 2017 and 2018, according to judiciary data. The Western District has courthouses near the U.S.-Mexico border, in Del Rio and El Paso.

Crane, who sits in McAllen, met with the US Marshals Service and public defenders in early January, before Trump was inaugurated. He also began monitoring migration trends, ensuring the court had interpreters in different languages at the ready, and discussing courtroom capacity issues.

The Marshals, which provide security in federal courthouses, began moving the prisoner population away from the border to make room for migrants to be detained if needed, Crane said.

Bashant, whose court has a location in El Centro, near the US-Mexico border, also said she’s had meetings with the Marshals Service, probation officers, and magistrate judges on the issue since becoming chief judge earlier this year.

During the first Trump administration when immigration cases increased, “we were almost at the breaking point,” Bashant said

“We’re all really nervous. What are the numbers going to look like?” Bashant said.

Chief Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas, who sits in Del Rio, said her immigration caseload has always been high, a trend that started over a decade ago, and her court remains prepared for spikes.

Immigration Priorities

Justice Department officials have already called on prosecutors to pursue charges for immigration offenses, including misdemeanor border crossings, and redirected national security and law enforcement resources toward immigration.

The Trump administration has also exempted US attorneys’ offices near the borders from a federal hiring freeze, allowing them to bring on more lawyers to prosecute immigration cases.

The department has signaled that it’s aware of the impact increased immigration prosecutions could have on the judiciary.

A January memo from senior DOJ official Emil Bove instructs US attorney’s offices to “coordinate as appropriate with the federal courts to inform the courts” of the department’s policy to prioritize immigration cases and “develop processes for handling the increased number of prosecutions that will result.”

Border Encounters

However, fears of a caseload spike across the border haven’t been realized.

US Customs and Border Protection logged under 12,000 encounters with migrants at the southwest land border in February, down from nearly 190,000 in February 2024.

And in the Rio Grande sector in southern Texas, the number of recorded encounters with migrants during a five-week period in February and early March plummeted by more than 87%, compared to the same time period last year, according to data shared by Crane.

“We’re still looking for an uptick, but we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Crane said.

Still, Moses said the Del Rio division had, as of March 19, more than 700 felony indictments filed in 2025, higher than usual at this point in the year. The leader of the US attorney’s office for her district announced last month that prosecutors had filed more than 900 criminal cases related to immigration offenses since Jan. 20.

“We’ve always had processes in place. We’re seeing a huge influx of cases now, but we’re already prepared for it,” Moses said.

Moses said that immigration cases are “more complicated than people realize,” and caseload increases can pose challenges for arranging sufficient bed space and scheduling sentencing hearings.

“You can increase the number of law enforcement agents, but if you don’t increase resources in the court system, you’re not going to get anywhere very quickly,” Moses said.