President Donald Trump’s deputies have reduced the success rate for migrants’ asylum claims to five percent, or just one-tenth of the approval rate under President Joe Biden.
The success rate for migrants without lawyers has fallen to just above one percent, down from 20 percent under Biden, according to federal data released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
“The Trump Administration’s actions on immigration are still coming at a breakneck pace two years into the term,” the pro-citizen Immigration Accountability Project (IAP) reported on October 20. “The changes being made by the DOJ, the BIA, and EOIR are crucial in maintaining a fair and efficient asylum process,” it added.
The successful reform is shutting the asylum loophole for millions of migrants who rationally used Biden’s welcome to walk into Americans’ workplaces, homes, and communities.
The fast-track success shows up in the years-long backlog of asylum cases, which is down to 2.3 million cases. Biden’s deputies expanded the backlog and used it as an excuse to free migrants into the U.S. job market.
Overall, the Justice Department’s 700 immigration judges — including the asylum courts — accepted roughly 514,000 cases since October 2025, and processed almost one million cases, including almost 100,000 cases in August, said TRAC. The score is roughly five times the roughly 200,000 cases annually processed before 2021.
The success of Trump’s reform is being downplayed by establishment publications, which prefer to cover the asylum reforms via personal stories of pitiable migrants and supposedly heroic judges.
The Washington Post, for example, portrayed one asylum judge as a hero for opposing the pro-citizen reforms established by Trump’s Board of Immigration Appeals:
She’d believed in the sanctity of America’s legal system since well before she swore an oath to the Constitution. Donoso Stevens decided to become an attorney when she read “To Kill a Mockingbird” as a high school junior. The ideals of truth and justice appealed to her, as did getting paid to persuade people she was right. The middle child of Ecuadorian immigrants in the Chicago suburbs, she’d always served as her siblings’ advocate, negotiating punishments and bedtimes. When she turned 17, her dad ordered a vanity plate for the pickup they shared: “2 B LWYR.”
“It is a hurricane-force wind against judicial independence,” said Dana Leigh Marks, a former immigration judge with a very pro-migrant record, told the Washington Post.
The establishment media is also championing migrants who are deported after losing their asylum pleas. The CBS show, 60 Minutes, sympathetically touted the case of a migrant, Moussa Diawara, who was deported to Ghana, leaving his wife and his U.S.-born children behind.
But the man had told U.S. asylum judges that he was gay, noted James Percival, the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
This illegal alien is @60Minutes poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations. I pulled his file. His claimed reason for fearing Mali was that he is “gay,” just in case you’re wondering how bad the immigration fraud problem is.
Percival then posted a sardonic tweet:
The vast majority of asylum seekers are not facing government persecution, but are instead — rationally — trying to improve their lives by moving into the United States. For example, a summer 2025 survey by pro-migration groups shows that only one out of every 27 border migrants claimed to meet the core requirement for winning political asylum in the United States.
“The abject absurdity, irrationality, and incoherence of the U.S. asylum system has been ignored for too long,” the IAP report wrote:
Most asylum applicants admit they are economic migrants. Rather than believing them and turning them away, bureaucrats began to twist asylum procedures and generate precedents to accommodate applicants who plainly did not qualify. The result was immigration courts and lawyers trying to pretend that generalized crime or gang violence constituted government persecution. Even obvious frivolity like an alien from France or England filing an asylum claim was humored and the alien allowed to move for countless delays to avoid a negative decision. In other words, this asylum crisis was a very deliberate choice.
As cartels saw this, they began to market their ability to help aliens travel to the United States and manipulate these loopholes. As more political and resource pressure grew, the immigration court system collapsed on itself and largely functioned (when it functioned) as a negative feedback loop. One of the cartels’ main selling points to aliens has been that once they arrive and claim asylum, they can remain in the United States indefinitely. If the immigration courts process claims swiftly, that whole narrative collapses.
Trump’s asylum reforms include the mass replacement of roughly 300 pro-migration judges, as well as regulatory changes by the Board of Immigration Appeals whose rulings are named after particular asylum cases.
The Immigration Accountability Project reported on October 20:
Over the past two years, the BIA has completely transformed the U.S. asylum system by issuing new precedents. Combined, these common-sense precedents shift the asylum landscape from one of endless bites at the procedural apple to efficient, early detection and dismissal of obviously frivolous claims. These new precedents include:
- Matter of B-S-A-N-, which broadly held that aliens with asylum claims from free democratic countries should have their claims denied;
- Matter of M-R-I-, which held that aliens who use Advance Parole to travel to the country in which they claim to face persecution have abandoned their asylum claim;
- Matter of G-R-B-, which held that immigration judges may, on their own motion, deny obviously frivolous asylum claims that fail to make a prima facie case;
- Matter of A-K-R-, which ended long delays while aliens were purportedly trying to secure counsel; and
- Matter of S-S-F-M-, in which Attorney General Pam Bondi overruled Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland and restored asylum precedents established by Attorney General Sessions in the first Trump Administration.
“Beyond these precedents, DOJ has issued a regulation empowering immigration judges to sanction misconduct by attorneys, aliens who are the subject of the proceedings, and certain witnesses,” the IAP wrote.
Pro-migration groups see the reforms differently.
“The Trump administration has also more quietly taken sweeping steps to weaken the U.S. immigration court system — threatening the independence of the courts and the due process rights of people seeking safety in the United States,” said a October 23 report by HIAS.
“Court watchers on the ground are sounding the alarm about changes they say could impact due process for immigrants fighting their deportation at the Bay Area’s only remaining immigration court,” said an October 7 report by NBCBayArea.com.
“Asylum court proceedings are a dystopian loop,” claimed PrismReport.com.
Meanwhile, as asylum fraud is reduced, Americans’ rents are no longer rising, and wages are nudging up in sectors such as construction and eldercare.
