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More than 1.5 million people in the US are waiting for their asylum claims to be heard, as the Supreme Court weighs the merits of the Trump-era Title 42 health policy — and could order it ended as soon as Tuesday.
The number of pending asylum applications has exploded in the past decade, according to an analysis of federal data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, and fears have grown that lifting Title 42 could unleash a fresh surge of migration across the US-Mexico border
The number of asylum seekers — 1,565,966 — is split between the 767,882 waiting for hearings before judges in the Department of Justice’s Immigration Courts and the 778,084 waiting for hearings before US Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Homeland Security Department, the analysis says.
The Syracuse clearinghouse says political instability in Mexico, Venezuela, Haiti, Central America and other regions is behind the escalating number of claims, which have outpaced the number of immigration judges and asylum officers put in place over recent presidential administrations.
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