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The number of people granted asylum in immigration courts hit a historic high this fiscal year under the Biden administration's adjustments to the asylum process, a recent data analysis shows.
But only 7% of families whose cases were moved to the front of the line through the administration's Dedicated Docket program got asylum, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, based at Syracuse University.
The number of people granted asylum by immigration judges rose from 8,495 in fiscal year 2021 to 23,686 in fiscal year 2022, according to the report.
The TRAC report, released in late November, said the 2022 number was the largest number of individuals granted asylum in any year in the courts' history. The total number of decisions also more than doubled from 24,810 to 51,607.
“He really had an impact on speeding up the asylum process,” Susan Long, co-director of TRAC and an associate professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse, said of President Joe Biden.
However, the analysis also showed that grants of asylum have slowed, with 50% of cases granted asylum in June falling to 41% of cases in September. In cases closed in three months to 18 months since July, the asylum grant rates have fallen 31 %.
Grant rates were higher for people who had lawyers, about 2 1/2 times more than those without representation. About 18% of those without lawyers got asylum. Also, those released from detention had better asylum grant rates, 54% this fiscal year, compared to those who were detained, 15% of whom were granted asylum.
The administration created the dedicated docket to speed up the processing of asylum requests from families who arrived on the southern border. More than 110,000 cases have been sent there and nearly 40,000 are now closed, TRAC reported.
Cases assigned to dedicated dockets have been expedited ahead of an existing approximately 2 million case backlog in the courts.
TRAC found that only a third, 33%, of those on the docket, were even able to file the complex asylum applications and about the same share, 34%, had attorneys. Only 2,984 of 39,187 closed cases of families on the dedicated docket were granted asylum.
With sped-up dockets, people have less time to find an attorney or gather evidence or witnesses for their cases, Long said.
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