On September 1, the Washington Examiner reported that 94 percent of asylum claims considered by the nation’s immigration judges in June were denied, compared to just half in June 2024. The Examiner story is based on an analysis recently released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a private group that obtains its information via FOIA. The figures are probably close to accurate (official stats are released quarterly, not monthly), but there’s context missing in that TRAC report that would help to explain why the recent jump in asylum denials was inevitable.
“Asylum Denials Rise to 94% Amid the Remaking of the Immigration Court”
The TRAC analysis bears the headline, “Asylum Denials Rise to 94% Amid the Remaking of the Immigration Court”, and it begins:
The number of individuals Immigration Judges grant asylum to each month has been falling. In June 2026, only 771 individuals were granted asylum — less than a quarter of the number of individuals awarded asylum just three years ago. At the same time, the number of asylum decisions has grown resulting in soaring asylum denial rates. In June 2026, 94 percent of all asylum cases were denied.
That’s straightforward, but as the headline suggests, the main focus of the TRAC analysis is the impact on denials due to the “remaking of the immigration court” under Trump II, or what it later refers to as a “radical transformation of the Immigration Court bench, driven by the Trump administration’s use of its firing and appointment powers”.
Specifically, according to TRAC, 279 immigration judges (IJs) “were fired or resigned” in FY 2025 and 2026 — 38 percent of the IJs on the bench at the end of FY 2024 — while 192 new and 53 temporary IJs joined the immigration court cadre since the outset of Trump II, bringing the total to 743 IJs “deciding asylum cases during FY 2026”.
Perhaps IJs assigned under Trump II were hired in whole or part because they were believed to be more skeptical of asylum claims than the judges who left, but read down and you will discover that IJs “serving before President Trump assumed office [also] began turning down an increasing proportion of asylum applications”.
As TRAC explains:
For example, consider all 130 judges who remained on the bench and were actively handing down asylum decisions throughout the FY 2021 — FY 2026 period. Three-fourths of these judges increased the proportion of asylum cases they denied during FY 2026 as compared with their individual denial rates in FY 2021. This increase averaged 33 percentage points. The median increase in the denial rate was 28 percentage points.
To be fair, TRAC made clear that this so-called “radical transformation” of the IJ corps was just “[o]ne factor affecting asylum outcomes”, but it didn’t offer any other “factors” for this recent change — and there are many it could have mentioned.
The Massive Growth in In Absentia Orders for Aliens Who Applied for Asylum
Immigration judges are under the direct jurisdiction of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), a DOJ component that also oversees the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which reviews immigration court (and other immigration) decisions.
And unlike TRAC, which obtains its statistics largely via FOIA, EOIR publishes its own figures quarterly, on a website captioned “Workload and Adjudication Statistics”. No offense to that private outfit, but the official government stats are the ones I generally use and rely on.
One web page on that EOIR statistics site is captioned simply “Asylum Decisions”, and it provides the figures for IJ asylum “grants” and “denials” as well as immigration asylum cases in which the asylum decision was “abandonment”, “not adjudicated”, “withdrawn”, or “admin[istrative] closure”.
That’s because the final IJ decision on an asylum claim isn’t always either a “grant” or a “denial”.
Aliens may “withdraw” their applications and instead request, for example, the privilege of voluntary departure in lieu of removal; or a case may be dismissed, or the alien may file an asylum application (Form I-589) not to seek asylum but instead to seek related humanitarian protections, in which case the asylum claim is “not adjudicated”; or one or both parties to the case may ask the IJ to “administratively close” the case, that is, to remove the matter from the court’s active docket.
Or the alien may appear in immigration court, file the I-589, and then fail to appear at a later hearing, in which case the application is deemed “abandoned”.
Of the 254,680 asylum decisions IJs issued in the first nine months of FY 2026, 7,231 (2.8 percent) were grants, 89,740 (35.2 percent) were denials, 44,062 (17.3 percent) were not adjudicated, 18,251 (7.2 percent) were withdrawn, and 3,315 (1.3 percent) were administratively closed — but 92,081 (36.2 percent), the largest single category of IJ asylum decisions, were ones in which the claim was “abandoned”.
Not all abandonments are no-shows — the line between abandonments and withdrawals gets blurred when “respondents” in removal proceedings “abandon” I-589s because they become eligible for some other form of relief that would allow them to remain (usually adjustment) — but the vast majority in the first nine months of FY 2026 were immigration court no-shows.
That’s because, as per EOIR’s “Asylum Applicant In Absentia Removal Orders” web page, IJs issued 90,288 in absentia orders of removal in cases in which the alien had previously appeared and filed an I-589 and then later didn’t return to court.
The filing of an I-589 preceded each of those orders, because as that webpage makes clear, this total: “Does NOT include cases in which a respondent indicated a fear of return but did not actually file an asylum application.”
This is a recent phenomenon: In FY 2022 — a year in which IJ issued more than 158,000 asylum decisions — IJs ordered just 7,470 asylum applicants (4.7 percent) removed in absentia when they failed to appear.
It wasn’t until FY 2023 that IJ in absentia removal orders topped 13,000, and they mushroomed from there: to more than 19,000 in FY 2024; to 50,000-plus in FY 2025; and now, as noted, to more than 90,000 in just the first nine months of FY 2026.
As an aside, TRAC claims that the IJ grant rate in June was 5.5 percent (or 5.9 percent if you add other forms of humanitarian protection).
But if the issue is simply how many I-589s IJs granted as compared to the total either “granted” or “denied”, the grant rate through the first nine months of FY 2026 was just over 7.3 percent — but again, it is impossible to tally that figure for June alone, and therefore the TRAC figure is likely correct.
Biden’s Release Policies
Back to the earlier point, and taking a page from TRAC, “one factor affecting asylum” applicant no-shows — and likely the key one — was how the Biden administration processed and released illegal migrants at the Southwest border and ports between FY 2021 and FY 2024.
Under section 235(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Border Patrol agents at the border and CBP officers at the ports can expel any migrant who crosses illegally or seeks inspection without proper admission documents (or with fraudulent ones), without ever placing that alien into IJ removal proceedings, a procedure known as “expedited removal”.
The sole exception is for aliens subject to expedited removal who request asylum or claim fear of harm if returned. Agents and officers are required under section 235(b)(1) to refer those aliens to USCIS asylum officers for “credible fear” interviews, to determine whether they may be eligible for asylum or other humanitarian protection.
Aliens who receive a “positive” credible fear determination from an asylum officer or IJ are placed into removal proceedings to pursue a protection claim; those who receive a negative determination are expelled.
As I reported in 2024, however, of the more than 2.475 million illegal aliens CBP officers and Border Patrol agents encountered at the Southwest border and ports in FY 2023, just over 185,000 were subject to expedited removal (even though the vast majority should have been) and just fewer than 145,100 were sent to asylum officers for credible fear interviews.
By contrast, according to DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics (OHSS), Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border released more than 909,000 of those aliens and CBP officers at the ports paroled more than 370,000 others.
The vast majority of those nearly 1.3 million aliens were simply deemed by Biden administration officials to be “asylum seekers”, served with Notices to Appear (“NTAs”, charging documents in removal proceedings), and sent to immigration court removal proceedings without first being interviewed by asylum officers to see whether they had asylum claims.
According to TRAC, the average immigration court case has been pending for 925 days since the service of an NTA — meaning most of the aliens released under Biden’s border policies in FY 2023 who were served with NTAs prior to release either came up or are coming up for hearings this year.
Consequently, and regardless of any purported “radical transformation of the Immigration Court bench”, the number of “asylum seekers” whose applications were denied in June or any other month in the past two fiscal years was bound to rise, and likely significantly, because of the massive number of aliens who were released without DHS determining whether they had valid claims — which many probably didn’t.
The “Work Authorization Magnet”
And if you want additional proof, look no further than the explosion in IJ in absentia removal orders in FY 2026 that were issued to aliens who came to court, filed asylum applications, and then failed to return to court.
Here’s the most logical explanation for why that’s occurred: While paroled aliens can immediately apply for work authorization, illegal migrants who are simply released aren’t employment authorized and must therefore find a way to get a work card.
Enter asylum applications, because migrants who file I-589s can receive work authorization after waiting 180 days.
Thus, it’s inevitable that tens of thousands of migrants: (1) entered illegally; (2) were placed into removal proceedings and released; (3) appeared before IJs and filed asylum applications so that; (4) they could receive work authorization; and then (5) never appeared again because they were really seeking work authorization, not asylum per se.
That “work authorization magnet”, coupled with the opportunity to live and work in the United States indefinitely — or at least until ICE could find them — drew untold numbers of aliens to come here illegally under Biden and apply for a protection (asylum) they never intended to receive or pursue.
Note that when they proposed amending the INA to create expedited removal in 1996, the sponsors of that change complained that the then-extant asylum system “has been abused by those who seek to use it as a means of ‘backdoor’ immigration”. And when Biden’s DHS bypassed expedited removal for over a million illegal migrants in FY 2023 alone, that was exactly what the asylum system became again.
“Asylum Denial Rates Reach All-Time High under Trump”
By the way, that Examiner article is headlined “Asylum denial rates reach all-time high under Trump”, but given how Biden’s DHS ignored INA detention mandates, rarely subjected migrants to expedited removal at the Southwest border and ports, and instead released millions of illegal aliens on the (unreasonable) assumption they were all asylum seekers, a new record for asylum denials should come as no surprise.
That isn’t to say the immigration court changes TRAC highlighted, or a change in administration itself, didn’t impact asylum denial rates — even among the IJs who predated the current administration.
Given “the Supreme Court follows the election returns”, as Finley Peter Dunne famously quipped, it’s not unreasonable for either ICE lawyers (who represent the government in immigration court) or IJs to do the same, especially given the large number of precedents that were issued by the BIA and attorney general — which guide IJ decisions — which have narrowed asylum since January 2025.
Those precedent decisions are another factor not mentioned in the TRAC analysis, and neither was the recission of guidance (the “Doyle memo”) ICE’s de facto general counsel issued under Biden in April 2022.
That guidance directed ICE lawyers to consider irrelevant “mitigating” factors when using “their professional judgment to do justice in each case”, including when “stipulating to issues”.
There are a lot of often hotly contested issues in asylum cases, and ICE attorneys likely did stipulate to many of them under Biden (to the alien applicant’s advantage, leading to a grant), provided they could read the clear ICE HQ handwriting on the wall.
Trump II rescinded that memo and the guidance it was based on (the “Mayorkas memo”) early on in the president’s latest term, which inevitably also caused the denial rate to rise.
Asylum Denial Rates Were Bound to Rise Regardless
Asylum denial rates have undoubtedly reached record highs, and a change in the immigration judges hearing those claims plainly was a factor. But denial rates were bound to rise regardless, given the hundreds of thousands of unscreened “asylum seekers” Biden’s DHS waved into the United States who are only now showing up — or failing to appear — in immigration court today.