More than 1.6 Million Pending Asylum Applications
How Biden is breaking our humanitarian protection system, and trying to hide the damage
By Andrew R. Arthur on August 16, 2023
Halfway through FY 2023 (through March) there were a total of more than 1.6 million pending asylum applications in the United States, in two different buckets: nearly 800,000 "defensive" asylum claims awaiting adjudication before fewer than 650 immigration judges in the nation’s immigration courts, with the other 842,000 being "affirmative" asylum applications in the USCIS backlog for decisions by fewer than 850 asylum officers, as my colleague Elizabeth Jacobs recently reported. That’s more applicants that than residents in 11 U.S. states, and an insurmountable burden for adjudicators, as the Biden administration has effectively broken the asylum system, and seeks to hide the damage.
The Immigration Courts
When I left the bench in January 2015, there were just fewer than 210,000 pending asylum claims, which seemed like a lot, given that I was one of 250-plus immigration judges. The immigration courts had several advantages then that they lack now, however.
The first was that my fellow immigration judges and I did a pretty good job of handling the flow. In FY 2015, just over 64,000 new applications came in the door, but thanks to the rate at which we were adjudicating cases, they added just about 40,000 claims to the backlog. That was not great, but it was manageable.
By contrast, more than 256,000 asylum applications were filed with the immigration courts in FY 2022, and you can add 196,000 more that were filed in the first six months of FY 2023 – at a rate six times as high as nine years prior.
https://cis.org/Arthur/More-16-Million-Pending-Asylum-Applications
