DALLAS—Some 48 students fill each of the auditorium-style classrooms, their bulky Immigration Law Handbooks tabbed with dozens of colorful stickies and laptop computers within reach.

For the next six weeks, the men and women who make up each class will study topics such as logic, ethics, legal decision-making, discretion, immigration history and trends.

Their classes at the USCIS Academy are part of a nationwide effort by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to recruit and train hundreds of new employees who will help tackle the agency’s mountainous backlog of cases.

Awaiting each of the students upon graduation will be a pile of petitions, some more than a year old. One by one, these adjudicators, as they are called, will decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of people anxiously waiting to come to the U.S., to remain here and work or to become citizens.

Since October, the agency has added 830 adjudication officers to its ranks, bringing the total working at immigration offices nationwide to 3,775. Another 590 are expected to be trained by the end of the year.

It’s all part of a renewed push to clear pending cases and to approve or deny most applications within six months. It has not been uncommon for some immigrants, who pay hundreds of dollars in filing fees, to spend a year or more awaiting a decision on their status.

About 1.4 million people applied for naturalization in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2007, nearly double the number of petitions filed the previous year. Driving the surge was a rush to file petitions before a planned fee increase took effect last summer and the upcoming presidential elections.

Overwhelmed, the agency warned that anyone who had applied after June 1, 2007, would likely wait 15 to 18 months to attain citizenship. That alarmed many applicants, who had hoped to become citizens in time to vote in November.

The agency has since said the waits will be shorter, but it won’t say by how much.

Several CIS offices around the country have only just finished processing citizenship applications filed last July. Others are even further behind. The Miami field office recently completed naturalization petitions filed in April 2007 and Phoenix was still backlogged to June of last year.

The agency is confident the infusion of new adjudicators will help it handle the surge of immigrants. Costs are covered by the fee increase that took effect last year.