The number of immigration cases being brought to Federal Court has more than quadrupled since 2020 — and some immigration lawyers are linking the surge in part to the federal government’s use of artificial intelligence and automation to clear visa application backlogs.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada insists that technology is not to blame and that multiple factors are driving the boom in legal challenges of the department’s decisions.
About 6,400 immigration cases were brought to Federal Court in 2020, a figure in line with the trend over the previous decade. The caseload spiked sharply in 2021, when 9,700 cases were sent to the court.
More than 28,000 cases were filed with the court last year and more than 6,600 were filed in the first quarter of 2026. The vast majority of these cases are not refugee matters.
Jacqueline Bonisteel, an Ottawa-based immigration lawyer, said the department is leaning more on technology to speed up decisions on immigration files — and the quality of those decisions is slipping as a result.
“The use of new technology and automation tools, it just means that a human officer isn’t spending as much time with the files as they once did,” she said.
Five years ago, Bonisteel said, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada would offer a detailed explanation of each decision to reject a visa application.
“It might be brief, but you’d have some sense that an officer engaged with the evidence that was filed,” she said.
“And now with these automated decision making tools, you usually don’t get much at all. There’s these canned lines that we see in almost every refusal decision.
“There’s no sign of engagement with the evidence. And that really seems to be a result of the technology and officers being under pressure to just turn decisions through, without going into depth and taking a close look at what was actually filed.”
Taous Ait, Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s press secretary, told The Canadian Press that IRCC’s AI and advanced analytics tools work under human oversight at all times. She said the AI tools assist with tasks like “triaging applications, identifying routine cases, generating summaries for officers” and answering client questions with chatbots.