The Trump administration plans to funnel potentially hundreds of thousands of asylum cases to immigration courts that are denying relief to nearly all applicants.
A Department of Homeland Security rule change announced Monday could more quickly shift asylum applications from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to immigration judges.
The change in how the federal government handles certain asylum petitions is meant to reduce the 1.4 million-case backlog at USCIS, according to the interim final rule going into effect Tuesday.
“For far too long the asylum system has been exploited for purposes of delay and work authorization, not legitimate claims of protection,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a news release. “America’s asylum system exists to protect individuals who genuinely fear persecution and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed to the timely adjudication of those claims instead of to those seeking to use the system as a loophole.”
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USCIS asylum officers handle applications for immigrants who are not in the deportation process, while immigration judges, who are Justice Department employees, oversee cases of those actively facing removal. However, the rule change would allow USCIS to send certain applications to immigration judges without interviewing the migrants seeking asylum.
That includes applications where the migrant is barred from applying for asylum because of a one-year filing deadline or is not eligible on the merits of the claim, according to the rule.
Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, director for US policy and advocacy for HIAS, said the international Jewish humanitarian organization worries the change would lead to more deportations with less due process. She called the number of the cases that could be moved under the rule “quite astounding.”
“This rule helps design a potential process where asylum seekers never once get to speak to any government official about their claim,” Dojaquez-Torres said. “One of our biggest concerns is that this is creating a streamline for asylum applicants to be returned back to countries where they’ll be harmed.”
More than 132,000 cases a year could get transferred from USCIS to the immigration courts under the change, DHS estimates. Overall, 31% of the cases in the USCIS backlog could be affected, according to the Federal Register notice.
Asylum denials from immigration judges have soared during the second Trump administration. Immigration judges denied 62% of cases in January 2025, but they denied 94% of cases in June, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The speedy closure of cases has decreased the backlog within the court system, which is down to fewer than 3.2 million cases from a peak of 3.7 million in 2024, according to TRAC.
Immigrants seeking asylum have a better success rate if USCIS handles their application, according to agency data. In the fiscal year 2025, the agency denied 61% of petitions that it issued decisions for. In the first quarter of this year, the denials reached 78%.
Last week a federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked USCIS from rejecting asylum applications and starting the deportation process for immigrants who fail to pay the $100 annual fee enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Three days after that decision, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a decision that asylum applications should be considered abandoned if the immigrant doesn’t pay the annual fee.
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