Justice Department Slashes Asylum Award Rates Down to 10 Percent
President Donald Trump’s deputies have sharply reduced the win rate by economic migrants in asylum courts, ensuring that only 10 percent of migrants won their asylum claims in December 2025.
Under President Joe Biden, slightly more than 50 percent of migrants won their cases for asylum in the fall of 2023, even though most were economic migrants and did not face government persecution.
Asylum wins are important because they allow illegal migrants to compete against Americans for wages and housing, to get green cards, file for citizenship, and put their back-home family relatives on the chain-migration waiting list. Roughly 2.3 million migrants have asylum cases, amid an imported population of at least 15 million illegal migrants.
The 10 percent asylum-approval rate is expected to drop further in 2026 as Attorney General Pam Bondi removes many older, pro-migration judges who have supported most asylum claims.
This drop in approval rates has a huge impact on President Trump’s ability to deport more illegal migrants.
For example, the rejection of asylum claims allows judges to issue a “Final Order of Deportation” to illegal migrants. The final order can be swiftly enforced by ICE, regardless of the raucous street protests by pro-migrant activist groups.
Trump’s ICE officials can also use the low asylum approval rate to persuade detained migrants that it makes sense to leave the United States well before their asylum court date. Aaron Reichlin Melnick, an advocate with the American Immigration Council advocacy group, complained about the new tactic:
Suddenly, you’re thrown in detention. You’re away from your job, you’re away from your family, you’re away from your [lawyer] resources. And there’s an ICE officer coming to you every single day in detention and saying, “You can get out today if you sign on this paper and give up your right to a day in court … they say, we’ll give you $2,000, we’ll give you $3,000 if you just sign this and go away.”
“I’ve heard reports of offers as high as $5,000 for people to give up and not get their day in court,” Reichlin told migration-advocate Bill Kristol on February 12. “It is hard to understate again, how intense the pressure is on people once they get into detention to give up,” said Reichlin.
The asylum denials also help deter additional migrants from the dangerous and expensive trek to the United States. Instead, the migrants are likely to stay in their home countries to grow their nation’s economy and to push for democracy in dictatorships such as Nicaragua.
The data showing the 80 percent drop in asylum approvals in late 2025 is provided by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
In turn, more judges are now issuing more final orders of deportation, and just 3 percent of illegal migrants are being legally allowed to stay. From October to December, judges issued 150,000 final orders, setting the stage for at least 600,000 final orders in 2026.
Since President Barack Obama’s term, Democratic leaders have allowed millions of economic migrants to take jobs in America under the vague claim that they somehow deserve asylum from supposed home-country repression or poverty.
Many migrants did not bother to file for asylum, but millions rationally did accept President Joe Biden’s offer. Once they applied, they were legally allowed to work until their asylum court date, which was often several years in the future.
Federal law largely limits asylum awards to people who can show they suffer from official repression. But progressives persuaded many judges to grant asylum to unlucky people from poor, corrupt, and chaotic countries.
For example, Lawrence O. Burman, a Democrat-appointed immigration judge in Arlington, Va., granted asylum to 90 percent of the 481 migrants in his courtroom until he had his retirement party on February 4. Burman “would be considered more or less the “gold standard” for well-qualified, subject matter expert, fair and impartial Immigration Judges,” said an online newsletter shared by migration lawyers.
Similarly, Judge Maureen O’Sullivan retired in mid-2025 after rubber-stamping 91 percent of 1,145 asylum pleas from 2020 to 2025. The pro-migration American Immigration Lawyers Association mourned her exit. She was appointed to the bench in 2010 by President Barack Obama’s Attorney General, after she had worked for the pro-migration National Lawyers Guild.
But Trump’s judges are more skeptical of the asylum claims because they are under personal and administrative pressure to follow the law. For example, even as economic migrants are losing their asylum cases, Trump’s judges recently provided asylum to Guang Heng, a Chinese man who filmed the Chinese government’s detention of many Muslims in Xinjiang province.
The new judges are reducing the years-long backlog of asylum cases created by Obama and Biden. In 2022, the backlog ensured claims took more than 1,100 days to process. In late 2025, cases were being processed in under 700 days.
However, the judges and ICE also face a huge catch-up task after the migrant waves since 2010. There are still roughly 3.5 million outstanding asylum cases, and 1.6 million “final orders” migrants are hiding in the United States. The 1.6 million number includes roughly 800,000 migrants with criminal convictions.
