Nearly eight in ten asylum seekers are now being turned away by immigration judges, a dramatic reversal from the Biden era that signals the most consequential shift in American immigration enforcement in years. In the last quarter, asylum grant rates plummeted to roughly 20% — down from 50% as recently as May 2022, when the southern border was hemorrhaging record numbers of illegal crossings.
The numbers aren't subtle. Deportations have topped 30,000 every month since Trump took office. In the most recent December on record, 38,215 illegal immigrants were removed — nearly double the 19,265 deported in December 2023 under Biden. Daily apprehensions at the border have cratered to 245, a 95% drop from the Biden-era average of 5,110 per day.
The floodgates didn't close themselves. This is what happens when an administration decides the immigration system should enforce the law rather than process an invasion.
The Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: remove judges who weren't doing their jobs, and replace them with people who will. Over the past year, the administration fired in excess of 100 immigration judges. This month alone, the Department of Justice hired 33 new ones. Another 36 were brought on in October. The Pentagon has been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts on temporary assignments to attack the backlog.
The results are measurable. Immigration courts are now completing roughly 12,000 cases per month — nearly double the 6,000 to 7,000 monthly caseloads under Biden.
The DOJ framed the overhaul bluntly:
"After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system."
The New York Bar Association expressed "deep concern" over the judicial firings, which is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east. But the math tells a different story than the legal establishment's hand-wringing. A 3.38 million-case backlog still looms — and even at the current accelerated pace, clearing it would take an estimated 14 years. Queens County alone carries 105,635 pending cases, the third-largest backlog in the country, as New York Post reports.
When the system is that broken, half-measures aren't reforms. They're window dressing.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, offered a corrective that shouldn't need offering but clearly does:
"If you look at what asylum is supposed to be, it's a very narrow definition . . . You have to be able to demonstrate a credible fear and be able to articulate that credible fear of persecution."
He drove the point further:
"It's not because there's a gang that's doing business down the block or you can't stand your mother in law or you can't find a job."
For years, the asylum system was treated as a general-purpose admissions program. Anyone who showed up at the border and uttered the right words was funneled into a process that could take years to resolve — years spent living and working in the United States, often with little incentive to appear for a hearing that might never come. The 50% grant rate under Biden wasn't evidence of legitimate persecution on a massive scale. It was evidence of a system that had abandoned its own standards.
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge himself, connected the dots:
"It's having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate."
"Drive down" is doing interesting work in that sentence. A more honest framing: the grant rate is returning to something resembling what asylum law was designed to produce.
The policy debate never stays abstract for long. Not when the consequences have names.
Laken Riley was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, murdered by an illegal immigrant. Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and killed in 2023. Her attacker, illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez from El Salvador, received a life sentence. Matthew Denice was 23 when he was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Ecuador in Milford, Massachusetts, in 2011.
These cases became flashpoints not because they were isolated, but because they were preventable. Every one of them involved someone who should not have been in the country.
Patricia Morin, Rachel's mother, told The Post what millions of Americans already understood:
"That's what American voted for, they voted for safety… this is the top issue that got him elected, and he's keeping his word."
She didn't stop there:
"Democrats keep talking about how bad all this is and it's not compassionate, but it's not virtue when you only give compassion to the criminal and don't give a second thought to the victim who has died."
That's the contradiction the left has never been able to answer. Compassion without accountability isn't compassion — it's negligence with better branding.
The scale of what the Trump administration inherited is worth sitting with. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 2.76 million people crossed the southern border — a record. In 2023, more than 2.4 million migrants arrived at the Southwest border, with 3.2 million encounters nationwide. By August 2023, 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden's handling of the border in national polls.
Seventy percent. In a country that can't agree on pizza toppings, seven in ten Americans looked at the border and saw the same thing: failure.
Biden's own words from a 2019 Iowa campaign event aged like milk left in the sun:
"We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre."
He got his wish. Americans have a 3.38 million-case asylum backlog, overwhelmed courts, and communities paying the price for policies designed to sound generous on a debate stage rather than function in reality.
Maureen Maloney, vice president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, has been fighting for tighter borders since her son Matthew was killed in 2011. She didn't mince words:
"What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come."
She also acknowledged the sheer scale of the problem now facing enforcement:
"It's impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration."
Even with courts running at double capacity, even with deportations exceeding 30,000 a month, the math remains brutal. A 14-year timeline to clear the existing backlog means the damage from the Biden years will outlast multiple administrations. The top destinations for deportees — Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order — represent a pipeline that took years to build and won't be dismantled overnight.
But the trajectory has reversed. Courts are adjudicating cases faster. Judges with military backgrounds are applying the law as written rather than as activists wish it read. The asylum grant rate reflects what the statute demands — a narrow, specific standard of persecution — not a generalized sympathy for anyone who makes the journey north.
Patricia Morin put it simply:
"We have all these unvetted people that are here in America and we don't know if they really are who they say they are."
That used to be an unremarkable observation. Somewhere along the way, it became a controversial one. The fact that it no longer drives policy paralysis is the most important shift of all.
