The backlog that would not move - and then conveniently did
Judge Lucilla Najera's recent campaign material says she cleared the court backlog at El Paso Justice of the Peace Precinct 5. State records show the backlog barely moved for nearly three years - until roughly 40,000 cases vanished in the two-month window her reelection campaign launched.
When Justice of the Peace Judge Lucilla Najera launched her reelection bid in November 2025, she came to voters with a confident message: she had done what her predecessor could not. She had cleared the backlog. Her campaign materials cited a chart showing she scheduled more than twice as many cases as the judge before her, framing the court at Precinct 5 as a model of productivity under her leadership.
The problem is the data - specifically, the monthly activity reports published by the Texas Office of Court Administration, the state agency that tracks every case filed, resolved, and pending at every justice court in Texas. Those numbers, pulled directly from the state's public records portal at card.txcourts.gov, tell a story that does not match the one Judge Najera is telling voters ahead of a May runoff against challenger Dora Oaxaca-Rivera. Click her to see the actual physical reports previously published.
Judge Najera took the bench in January 2023 inheriting 56,198 pending criminal cases. A large caseload is not unusual for a busy urban justice court. What is unusual is what those numbers did over the next 34 months: almost nothing.
The chart below tracks criminal pending cases at Precinct 5 Place 1 across every available OCA reporting period from January 2023 through December 2025. The pattern is hard to argue with. The line sits between 54,000 and 61,000 for nearly three straight years - not trending down, not reflecting the work of a judge aggressively moving her docket. If anything, it drifts upward through 2025. Then it falls off a cliff.
No other El Paso justice court shows a remotely comparable drop in the same period. Precinct 1, Precinct 2, Precinct 3, Precinct 4 - all of them show gradual, normal fluctuations across 2025. Precinct 5 is the outlier, and the timing of its dramatic dip is not incidental.
Judge Najera's campaign material states she cleared the court's backlog "through 2022" - cases left over from her predecessor's tenure. She points to scheduling numbers as evidence: 1,768 cases scheduled in 2022 under the previous judge, versus 3,847 scheduled in 2024 under her watch.
That comparison confuses activity with results. Scheduling a case for a hearing is not the same as resolving it. You can put every case on the calendar and still have 60,000 of them sitting unresolved if those hearings don't end in final dispositions. The only honest measure of backlog is the pending caseload - how many cases remain open at the close of each reporting period.
Furthermore, if she truly cleared the 2022 backlog, the pending number should have fallen steadily from the moment she took office. It did not. She inherited 56,198 pending criminal cases in January 2023. Through all of 2023, all of 2024, and most of 2025, that number barely budged. The backlog her predecessor left her was still there, largely intact, nearly three years into her term.
This is the question that matters most, and it is one that public records - not campaign talking points - should answer.
Texas court reporting distinguishes between cases that are truly resolved - adjudicated on the merits, with a verdict, plea, or dismissal with findings - and cases that are placed on "inactive status." Inactive status is an administrative designation. It removes a case from the active pending count without actually closing it. The case still exists. It has simply been moved to a column where it no longer makes the judge's backlog numbers look bad.
A court can make its docket look dramatically cleaner overnight by transferring thousands of cases to inactive status. No hearings required. No judicial work. Just a designation change, and suddenly the number on the campaign flyer looks a lot more flattering.
The OCA data does not show what happened to those 40,000-plus cases. It shows only that they were there in October 2025 and gone by December 2025. To find out whether they were genuinely adjudicated or administratively shelved, you need the case-level disposal records - specifically, the disposal reason codes that every Texas court is required to report.
This publication has submitted a Public Information Act request to El Paso County seeking exactly that: the disposal reason codes for every case removed from the active docket at Precinct 5 during October and November 2025, as well as any administrative orders Judge Najera signed during that period authorizing mass docket actions. Those records will tell us whether the backlog was cleared or merely hidden.
Judge Najera's campaign claim of a cleared backlog may prove partially accurate when the full records come in - some genuine adjudication may have occurred in that two-month window. But the scale of the drop, the timing relative to her campaign launch, and the absence of any corresponding surge in actual case disposals across the prior 34 months all raise questions that her campaign materials do not answer.
Here is a social media post showing her campaign reelection kicking off on November 9, 2025.
Voters in the May runoff deserve a straight accounting. Not a scheduling chart. Not a carefully worded claim about cases "through 2022." The actual number of cases that were adjudicated versus administratively dismissed or transferred to inactive status. The actual record of what this court accomplished during Judge Najera's first term - and what it did not.
The state data is public. The court records are public. The timeline is plain. El Paso deserves a justice court that works - and a judge who is straight with voters about whether it does.
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