The U.S. government denied a record percentage of applications for asylum in June, continuing the efforts of President Donald Trump’s administration to shift U.S. immigration courts in a pro-enforcement direction.
According to a report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which obtained data via Freedom of Information Act requests, immigration judges denied 94 percent of asylum applications in June. Out of more than 14,000 applications considered in June, judges granted only 771, a statistic that the Washington Examiner described as an “all-time high.”
Significant Shift
This marks a significant decline from Joe Biden’s presidency. In mid-2023, for example, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the agency within the U.S. Department of Justice that runs U.S. immigration courts, was approving more than half of all asylum requests.
The New American previously reported that the EOIR had granted only 8.8 percent of requests so far in fiscal 2026. The most recent data indicates that the agency is continuing to strengthen its pro-enforcement approach to immigration policy.
Additionally, the EOIR is considering more asylum cases. In June 2023, for example, the EOIR considered fewer than 6,000 cases. That figure more than doubled in June 2026, to about 14,000.
Change in the Courts
TRAC attributed this shift in part to the changing composition of U.S. immigration courts. For example, it noted that “a total of 279 Immigration Judges were fired or resigned during FY 2025 [and] FY 2026”; that’s “approximately 38 percent of the 735 Immigration Judges who were employed at the end of FY 2024.” The Trump administration has replaced those judges with individuals presumably more likely to decline asylum requests — and has even hired additional judges beyond replacement levels.
Commenting on the TRAC report, Andrew R. Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) described “a new record for asylum denials” as “no surprise,” “given how Biden’s [Department of Homeland Security] ignored [Immigration and Nationality Act] 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.”
Abandoned Claims
Arthur also revealed a more complicated picture of U.S. immigration-court decisions, based on official EOIR data. He noted:
One web page on [the] EOIR statistics site is captioned simply “Asylum Decisions”, and it provides the figures for IJ [immigration judge] 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.” …
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”.
This data, according to Arthur, indicates that a significant proportion of illegal aliens who apply for asylum are simply not showing up for their immigration-court hearings — “IJs [have] issued 90,288 in absentia orders of removal” so far in fiscal 2026 — which he described as “a recent phenomenon” that developed during the Biden administration.
Congress Must Act
Nonetheless, the data indicates that the Trump administration is continuing to deliver on immigration — despite broken promises elsewhere — and reverse Biden’s pro-open-borders policies. As an indication of its efforts, a separate CIS report found that the number of illegal aliens living in the United States dropped to 13.5 million in July 2026 from 15.8 million in January 2025. Of course, 13.5 million is still far too many, but at least the number is declining, not growing.
Ultimately, Congress must act to codify the Trump administration’s reforms and restore constitutional, pro-American immigration policies.
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