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In 2019, President Donald Trump’s judges in the immigration courts processed 67,520 asylum claims, or three times the 22,319 cases in 2016, according to data provided by TRAC Reports Inc, at Syracuse University.
In 2019, the courts denied 69 percent of asylum claims. That is 10 points above the 2016 rejection rate of 59 percent,
So the courts denied 46,755 asylum requests in 2019, four times the 12,188 requests that were denied in 2016.
More cases are being processed because the Department of Justice has added judges and streamlined the process.
The backlog of all court cases rose from 768,257 cases at the end of 2018, to 1 million cases at the end of 2019, as almost 1 million Central American migrants arrived at the southern border. The backlog has risen to 1.1 million since October 2019 as more of the 2019 migrants filed their asylum claims.
Fewer asylum claims are being filed in 2020 because of Trump’s asylum reforms.
The time taken to complete each immigration case is 711 days in 2020. That is slightly lower than the 2018 backlog of 718 days, despite the huge inflow in 2019.
But that backlog is a huge problem, partly because it gives migrants more time in the United States to get jobs and hide from enforcement authorities.
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