The Asylum Denial Machine

In April, immigration judges set two alarming records by closing over 11,000 asylum cases and denying 80% of them in a single month. An avalanche of asylum denials is just beginning.

Asylum’s decline and eventual devastating demise have been forecasted by a chorus of scholars¹ in recent years who correctly point out that, on the scales of justice, new immigration policies implemented across the Global North are heavily weighted against—rather than for—migrants who are seeking humanitarian protection.

This has been true for many years now. The European Union, the United States, and Australia (as well as many other countries at the direction of economic superpowers) have gone to great lengths to prevent migrants from ever reaching their borders (i.e., “border externalization”) while policy changes big and small make asylum more difficult to obtain for those migrants who are able to arrive at the legal shores of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations.

Throw away any misguided associations you may have of the relationship between political party and moral superiority: this is not a partisan issue. Republicans and Democrats in the United States, as well as political liberals and conservatives in other countries (difficult as it is to directly compare to what we call liberal and conservative in the U.S.), are increasingly united in a shared agenda to reduce access to asylum, despite their occasionally divergent rhetorical justifications for doing so.

The latest data on asylum adjudications in the U.S. immigration court system illustrates this broader trend with alarming clarity and renewed urgency. In April 2025, immigration judges completed more asylum cases than any month on record² and denied a higher percentage of those cases than any month on record. In short, the immigration courts, under EOIR Director Sirce Owens, have become little more than an Asylum Denial Machine designed to feed into the Trump administration’s mass deportation program. But as the data shows, while Trump may take the blame or the credit for these recent developments, he did not act alone.

In this post, let’s look more closely at the available data to see what has changed in asylum adjudications and why.

A few preliminary notes to make sure we’re on the same page. Asylum is a form of humanitarian protection that has existed for many centuries, but was codified in international and national law in its current form after World War II. Immigrants must be physically in the country where they wish to request asylum. In recent years, most asylum cases have been decided by immigration judges while the person is in “removal proceedings” (facing the possibility of a deportation order). For many reasons, including the fact that the immigration courts are not fully independent, the ability of immigrants to first request and subsequently obtain asylum is highly dependent on a variety of institutional, social, political, and economic factors beyond simply the basic overall quality of their asylum case. This final observation is crucial to grasp, because the current political jockeying over asylum typically translates to a weekly (if not daily) deluge of policy and practice tweaks (most of which fly below the radar of most Americans) that ultimately shapes who gets asylum.

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The Asylum Denial Machine Shifts into High Gear

The U.S. immigration courts have never seen such a dramatic reversal of asylum case outcomes over such a short period of time—ever. Asylum denial rates have fluctuated over time, that much is obvious. On a monthly basis, the percent of asylum cases denied had previously been as low as under 40 percent during the Obama administration and as high as nearly 75 percent during the first Trump administration.

To understand what drives these numbers, we should keep in mind that factors such as access to attorneys, the current composition of asylum cases, and ever-changing U.S. policies all influence how cases are decided. If fewer cases are decided in a given month and those cases possess qualities (intrinsic and extrinsic) that typically result in denials, the overall denial rate will be higher. President Bush oversaw a downward trend in denial that continued into the Obama administration, but then denials increased under Obama. Similarly, denial rates were down due to COVID-19 but then increased again under Biden and continued into the Trump administration.

But that long-term variation is nothing like what we have seen in the past year and a half. From a recent low of 44 percent denial rate in September of 2023, asylum seekers have faced a nearly unrelenting month-over-month leap in denial rates that brings us up to the most recent month. In April 2025, about 80 percent of all asylum cases adjudicated resulted in denial. Just one in five asylum seekers in April received some kind of humanitarian relief, the same percentage of NSYNC band members that most of us can name without resorting to Google.

The surge in denials from 44 percent to 80 percent denial rate is best visualized using month-to-month denial rates going back to 2001. By comparison, it took roughly seven years, from 2012 to 2019, to cover a similar increase. The immigration courts accomplished that same increase in just 21 months.

This data prompts a further speculative question: where will it stop? It hypothetically possible that immigration judges across the country will collectively deny up to 95 percent (or more) of all asylum cases, effectively turning the entire country into the “asylum free zones” of Atlanta’s or Omaha’s immigration courtrooms. We are all Atlanta now—or will be soon.

I warned above not to be taken in by partisan affinities. Now I want to back that up with data. The surge in denials we see now did not start with the Trump administration. It started with Biden. Let me say that again in case you are tempted to misrepresent reality: do not attribute the surge in asylum denials solely to the Trump administration; Biden is equally to blame (or praise, if you view this as a good thing).

As we can see below, the steady increase that began in September of 2023 continued all the way up to January 2025. Already by the end of 2024, immigration judges during the Biden administration were issuing denials at prior Trump I rates. All Trump II had to do was continue the trend with even harsher policies to incentivize or force immigration judges to issue denials or close cases out before they even had the opportunity to make their case in court.

High denials rates, in themselves, do not constitute an Asylum Denial Machine. It is possible to have low numbers of case completions made up primarily of difficult cases—and this would result in high denials rates that affect comparatively few people.

But that’s not what’s happening.

Immigration judges have been completing asylum cases at a steady clip since the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency—but judges are now closing cases at a breakneck pace since the start of the Trump administration. In fact, what’s most unique about the current administration is not its denial rates, but its overall case completions. Not only did April set a record for the overall asylum denial rates, it set a record for total cases completed: 11,535 in total.

Trump was already getting close to that pace by the end of his first administration, when the pandemic grounded everything to a halt. But this data is from just the third month of the current administration, which means we could be in for an avalanche of denials that could last for several years and impact the lives of well over a million people.

Why are asylum denials so high?

At this point, you are probably wondering why asylum denials have spiked so significantly since 2023 and continued in recent months. As I said above, this trend reflects a broader multi-national push to restrict asylum seekers from access to humanitarian protections, both before and after arriving in many of the world’s main immigrant receiving countries. But this general observation does not, alone, provide insight into the mechanisms by which asylum is being choked off.

I am not able to provide a definitive explanation for why asylum denials are so high. But I can propose a few plausible, and likely mutually reinforcing, reasons why this trend will likely continue.

(1) The most important reason that attorneys have cited so far is the Biden administration’s Circumvention of Lawful Pathways (CLP) rule in May 2023 immediately following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency and Biden’s Securing the Border issued in June 2024. These policies combined to make a lot of recently arrived asylum seekers ineligible for asylum if they did not enter through CBP One at a port of entry—and, of course, even those that did follow those rules at the time are being mischaracterized and treated by the current administration as if they made unlawful entries anyway. These policies appear to be the foundation of the rise in denials.

(2) Before I move on to more Trump-era reasons, I want to mention a further Biden-era explanation that a few trusted colleagues have shared with me in private but not necessarily felt comfortable saying out loud in certain settings. And to be clear, I have wondered—and worried—about this very thing, only to feel some vindication for my concerns. Simply put: the Biden administration’s parole policy allowed a lot of weak cases into the immigration court system. This is not the same as saying that these cases are fraudulent, nor does it imply that asylum applicants or their attorneys are acting in anything other than good faith. But it does mean that a lot of migrants were promised a bite at an apple that almost certainly was far out of reach.

(3) Immigration attorneys cite a rise in adverse credibility findings in asylum cases for reasons they characterize as obsessively trivial. Since asylum is really up to the judge, and since credibility—or the judge’s finding as to whether the applicant is believable or not—is an essential part of the asylum process, credibility is a convenient (and mostly incontestable) way to deny asylum cases. Reporters who are interested in understanding this more should ask around to local immigration attorneys for examples of how this is playing out in practice. This is not entirely new, nor is it limited to the Trump administration, but I do get the anecdotal impression that this is leading to a very real sense of futility among attorneys.

(4) Internal policies are incentivizing, or perhaps even requiring, asylum denials. As I wrote a few weeks ago, internal memos from EOIR Acting Director Sirce Owens are twisting the knobs of the Asylum Denial Machine to gear toward denials by mandating that applications are effectively rejected as insufficient for a mistake as little as failing to check a box. Notably, the administration can’t exactly sit in court with each judge and tell them how to rule in every case. Yet the administration is finding ways to predispose cases towards rejections and denials without ever having to tell judges how to decide on the merits, if they prevent cases from getting to the real merits in the first place.

(5) Many immigration judges that do not explicitly align with the Trump administration’s hostility toward asylum seekers have either refused to participate (i.e., resigned) or been summarily fired. In this way, the composition of immigration judges on the bench today differs from what it was just six months ago. My understanding from reliable sources is that judges who remain on the bench do not need additional policy to be told how to decide asylum cases; judges clearly understand their marching orders and understand the consequences of stepping out of line.

These explanations are plausible, but not necessarily determinate. Some of these latter reasons don’t explain the increase in denial rates during the Biden administration but it is evidence for why the increase has continued and why it is likely to remain high for the duration of the Trump administration. And we need more on-the-ground accounts at courts across the country to identify and evaluate the variety of factors shaping asylum outcomes right now.

Side note: If you or a philanthropic funder you know would like to help fund scholarly work on this topic, I am looking for support for a new research project to do exactly this. Please reach out if you have suggestions.

Does asylum have a future?

We never truly know if we are living through the end of something, because we only know it is—or was—the end after it has ended. The closest we can come to a metaphor for an end that has not yet ended is twilight: that period of time after the sun has set while we yet register its presence through a receding glow and the commensurate march of new darkness.

We might be living in the twilight of asylum. It is impossible to say for sure, and the impossibility of knowing is compounded by the fact that the vantage point from which we will view this moment is a vantage point that has yet to be formed, and formed by our present deliberations over whether this is the future we want for ourselves and for the international system of humanitarian protection.

Despite its many well-documented weaknesses, shortcomings, and internal contradictions, I believe there exists in our asylum and refugee systems some trace of that very old spirit of solidarity with human suffering. I may be deeply skeptical of the ways in which we have inadequately systematized human solidarity in the form of filings and hearings, but I nonetheless believe that asylum’s total elimination would be dangerous moral and political step backward.

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1. To cite just two examples:

• Mountz, A. (2020). The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago. University of Minnesota Press.

• Schoenholtz, A., Ramji-Nogales, J., & Schrag, P. (2021). The End of Asylum. Georgetown University Press.

2. “On record” means going back to the start of FY 2001, which is the earliest public data available from TRAC Reports, Inc. It is possible that more asylum cases were decided prior to 2001 (though I doubt it) and plausible that a higher percentage were denied in some month prior to 2001.