News from TRAC

Asylum Grant Rates Decline by a Third

(20 Nov 2024) Asylum seekers are having less and less success at their individual hearings before an Immigration Judge. The latest case-by-case Court records for October 2024 show asylum grant rates had declined to just 35.8 percent. This is in down sharply from earlier in the current administration when grant rates had climbed to above 50 percent. During most of FY 2023 grant rates rose to 52.6 percent in September 2023. However, since then asylum grant rates have fallen. Just 13 months later in October 2024 asylum grant rates had fallen by a third from this earlier peak.

During this same period the number of claims the Court was able to rule on fluctuated between 6,000 and 7,000 but had not risen. The number of asylum decisions in September and October 2024 were typical: one on the low side of this range (September 2024, 6,141 decisions) and the other on the high side (October 2024, 6,897).

Asylum grant rates varied a great deal depending upon the country the immigrant was from. Five countries had grant rates of less than 20 percent during FY 2024. These were: Dominican Republic (11.0%), Mexico (16.6%), Colombia (19.3%), Ecuador (19.7%), and Brazil (19.7%). Peru was only slightly higher with 20.6 percent granted asylum.

Other nationalities had very high asylum grant rates. During FY 2024. the top five nationalities by the rate at which individuals were granted asylum were: Belarus (88.4%), Afghanistan (88.4%), Uganda (86.4%), Eritrea (85.3%) and Russia (85.2%). Most of these countries had a few hundred asylum decisions issued, although Russian asylum seekers received decisions in over 4,400 cases during FY 2024.

These findings are based on an analysis of recently received case-by-case Immigration Court records by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

To dig further into all the details by Court location, nationality, gender, age, custody, representation and more use TRAC’s online Asylum Decision tool found here.

Read Full Report

Email Sign-Up

TRAC is a self-supporting, nonpartisan, and independent research organization specializing in data collection and analysis on federal enforcement, staffing, and spending. We produce multiple reports every month on critical issues, and we also provide comprehensive data analysis tools.

To know more about our work, click here.