The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) — the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — publishes quarterly statistics on the office’s activities, from pending appellate cases to immigration judge (IJ) hiring. Likely the most surprising figures relate to asylum decisions, wherein EOIR reports protection grants dropped to their lowest level in over a decade in the first half of FY 2026. You can credit policy changes under Trump II and blame a lack of screening of so-called “asylum seekers” at the borders and ports under Biden for that trend.
“Asylum Decisions”
Generally, immigration experts and most in the media consider two different and diametrically opposed figures when discussing asylum decisions: grants and denials.
In reality, however, grants and denials are just two of six possible outcomes that may occur after aliens file a Form I-589, “Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal” with an IJ.
Applicants may “abandon” the I-589s they file in immigration court, most notably (and generally) when they fail to appear for their scheduled hearings, at which point they will be ordered removed in absentia.
Or the alien may “withdraw” the application and instead request the privilege of voluntarily departing the United States in lieu of removal, under section 240B of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
Alternatively, the I-589 may be filed by the alien not to seek asylum but instead to seek to ancillary forms of protection: withholding of removal under section 241(b)(3) of the INA (also known as “statutory withholding”) or protection under Article III of the Convention Against Torture (CAT).
In that instance, the outcome is listed on the EOIR “Asylum Decisions” chart as “not adjudicated”.
Finally, one or more of the parties to the case may ask the IJ to “administratively close” the case, that is, to remove the asylum application from the court’s active docket.
It was common under the Biden administration’s rules governing the “prioritization” of certain cases (at the expense of all the rest) for ICE, the alien applicant, or both to seek administrative closure, especially if the claim was weak or nonexistent.
That didn’t mean the alien was abandoning or withdrawing the claim, let alone that the alien would be removed. Instead, it was little more than a maneuver to keep the disaster the last administration had unleashed on IJs’ dockets with its “catch and release” border policies from public attention.
But given DOJ entered into a consent judgment with the state of Texas in federal district court late last month and agreed to stop closing pending cases (no big loss for the department, because Trump I tried unsuccessfully to end the practice and Trump II was no big fan, either), don’t expect to see many more asylum claims to fall within that category anytime soon.
Denials Up, Grants Down
Combining those six potential outcomes together, IJs made more than 150,500 decisions in asylum cases in the first six months of FY 2026, and just 5,086 were grants — 3.4 percent of the total.
Contrast that to the asylum grant as a percentage of the “total” asylum decisions made in FY 2025 (10 percent), FY 2024 (12 percent), FY 2023 (14.4 percent), FY 2022 (14.2 percent), or FY 2021 (16 percent), and see that the current grant rate is just a fraction of what it has been in recent years.
Or compare the current grant percentage total to FY 2016 (15.8 percent) and see that IJs are granting about a fifth as many asylum claims by percentage as they were 11 fiscal years ago, when both the total number of grants (8,650) and of decisions (54,709) were much lower on a per annum basis.
That said, the most useful way to analyze whether IJs are granting more or fewer asylum applications is to return to the binary: grants as a percentage of asylum applications that are either granted or denied.
In the first half of FY 2026, IJs granted or denied 57,776 asylum claims, of which just 5,086 were grants, resulting in a grant rate of 8.8 percent.
Here are the results of that analysis in prior years: FY 2025 — 24.4 percent grant rate; FY 2024 — 45.7 percent; FY 2023 — 48.1 percent; FY 2022 — 46 percent; FY 2021 — 34.4 percent; FY 2020 — 25.6 percent; FY 2019 — 29.4 percent; FY 2018 — 33.1 percent; FY 2017 — 37.5 percent; and FY 2016 — 42.5 percent.
Consequently, and regardless of how grants as a percentage of asylum decisions are calculated, IJ asylum grants were way down, and denials were way up, in the first half of FY 2026.
Reasons for the Decline in Asylum Grants
As the forgoing analysis suggests, the percentage of asylum grants increases when Democrats (Obama and Biden) are in the White House and drops when Trump occupies the Oval Office.
Which makes sense, given that Democrats are much more liberal when it comes to both asylum and immigration generally than Republicans in general or Trump in particular, and when you consider the power the president’s attorney general as head of the Department of Justice has to make rules EOIR and then IJs must follow.
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, tightened the standards governing asylum claims, most notably in his June 2018 opinion in Matter of A-B-, and then Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland, relaxed those rules when he vacated Matter of A-B- in June 2021.
The only way grants would not have fallen under Sessions and risen under Garland would have been if IJs simply ignored the then-current attorney general’s directives.
That trend has accelerated under Trump II, as I have reported.
For example, in two cases, Matter of S-S-F-M- and Matter of R-E-R-M- & J-D-R-M-, then-AG Pam Bondi limited aliens’ ability to claim asylum based on gang violence and domestic violence abroad, respectively.
In Matter of C-I-G-M- & L-V-S-G-, the BIA explained how IJs should deny asylum claims based on so-called “asylum cooperative agreements” (“ACAs”, better known as “safe-third country agreements”) abroad.
In Matter of H-A-A-V-, the BIA held that IJs “are not required to hold merit hearings on applications that are incomplete or where an applicant is ineligible for relief”, in essence allowing the immigration courts to speed up the denial process by pretermitting worthless and incomplete applications.
The list goes on, but a shift in executive-branch asylum policy is likely not the only reason for the massive decline in immigration court grants.
The other major reason has to do with the applicants themselves, and the prior administration’s migrant policies.
Under Biden, CBP encountered millions of inadmissible aliens at the Southwest border and ports and quickly released about six million of them into the United States, most without subjecting them first to “expedited removal” and “credible fear” screening to determine whether they had valid asylum claims.
Those aliens are now reaching the final stages of asylum adjudication in the immigration courts, and because Biden’s DHS cut screening corners at the front end of the process, IJs are now concluding they aren’t really the “asylum seekers” the last administration commonly and repeatedly claimed them to be.
Expect This Trend to Continue
Expect asylum denials to increase and grants to decline, both in real numbers and as a percentage of total decisions, at least as long as Trump is president. Part of that has to do with an effort by DOJ under Trump II to tighten the asylum rules, but you can fault the Biden administration, as well: Its migrant “catch and release” policies left IJs with a lot of bad asylum claims to reject.