Federal data shows 2025 will be a record year for the number of asylum applications being considered by immigration courts.
Seeking asylum is a right under U.S. and international law. Asylum seekers facing immigration court typically arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, where asylum was heavily restricted during the last months of President Joe Biden’s administration and completely blocked under President Donald Trump’s.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph is a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute who’s been analyzing immigration court data. She says courts are set to see 1 million asylum applications this fiscal year — despite courthouse arrests and other aggressive enforcement.
“This immigration enforcement is incentivizing people to try to get protection, so they can stay in the United States,” she said.
That’s up from just over 900,000 applications received during the last fiscal year. Bush-Joseph says as the administration narrows legal pathways for immigrants and revokes temporary protections for groups like Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans, more and more people are turning to asylum because it’s one of the few viable options left for immigrants to stay in the U. .permanently.
“There’s this misconception that people who are in the country without authorization, if they’re here long enough, have some type of pathway forward, that they could get a green card, and they’re just not doing that,” she said.
At the same time, Bush-Joseph says the number of asylum application denials is also at a high and many immigrants are unrepresented in court proceedings. Many of the cases before immigration judges now are a few years old, part of a backlog of some 2.5 million cases still pending.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration cut funding for a congressionally approved program offering legal aid to immigrant children facing immigration court alone. Legal providers sued to keep that access, and the case remains in court.
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