US asylum approval for unrepresented migrants falls below 5 percent

Migrants without lawyers now win asylum in U.S. immigration courts at a rate of just above one percent, according to federal data released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Under the Biden administration, that success rate stood at 20 percent — a drop of roughly 90 percent, and one achieved without a single new statute.

The mechanism is throughput. The Justice Department's 700 immigration judges accepted roughly 514,000 cases since October 2025 and processed almost one million cases overall, including nearly 100,000 in August alone — about five times the roughly 200,000 cases processed annually before 2021. The years-long backlog has fallen to 2.3 million cases. When claims take years to resolve, the economic case for filing a weak one collapses; the wait no longer pays.

The Immigration Accountability Project, in an October 20 report, described the changes pushed by the DOJ, the Board of Immigration Appeals and the Executive Office for Immigration Review as "crucial in maintaining a fair and efficient asylum process," and argued that most asylum applicants admit they are economic migrants. A summer 2025 survey by pro-migration groups found that only one in 27 border migrants claimed to meet the core requirement for political asylum. The report cited asylum claims filed by aliens from France or England as examples of obvious frivolity — the sort of applications that a slower, more generous system once processed anyway.

Opponents frame the shift differently. A former immigration judge, Dana Leigh Marks, told the Washington Post the reforms amount to "a hurricane-force wind against judicial independence." The paper profiled asylum judge Donoso Stevens, daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants, as an opponent of the changes; CBS's 60 Minutes featured Moussa Diawara, deported to Ghana and separated from his U.S.-born children. Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival responded by calling Diawara the "poster child" of what 60 Minutes calls wrongful deportations, noting his claimed fear of Mali rested on his sexuality — and posting that the vast majority of asylum seekers are not facing persecution but improving their lives by moving.

The contrast with Europe is difficult to ignore. The same migration flows persist across the EU because the welfare state still pays claimants while they wait, and removals remain largely theoretical. Washington has instead made waiting itself the deterrent — a policy lever that costs the treasury nothing, because the applicant bears the delay. Whether European governments copy it is a separate question; their political incentives, as importer coalitions of both voters and cheap labor, point the other way.

A system that once approved one in five unrepresented claimants now approves roughly one in a hundred.