“The county in the country with the fastest growing number of residents with pending cases before the Immigration Court was Mecklenburg County (Charlotte) in North Carolina. Pending cases there shot up by 34 percent between May and December 2017. Coming in second with a growth rate of 30 percent over this same period was Loudoun County (Leesburg), Virginia. Nationally, the Immigration Court backlog over the same period increased by 11 percent, reaching a new all-time high of 667,839 at the end of December. These pending cases were spread across 2,559 separate counties. Only two counties — Pinal County (Florence), Arizona and El Paso County, Texas — out of the top 100, experienced a reduction in the number of residents with pending court cases. California was the state with the largest number of counties that ranked in the top 100 by the current size of their pending Immigration Court backlog. That state included 19 out of the top 100 counties. New Jersey, New York, and Texas each had ten counties in the top 100. A total of 25 states had at least one county that ranked among the top 100 in the nation in the concentration of residents with pending court cases. These results are based upon case-by-case court records that were obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University and are based on the reported address for each immigrant. If the individual was currently detained, the location was the address of the detention facility. To see the full report, including rankings for the top 100 counties where the most immigrants with pending court cases reside, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/497/“