U.S. immigration courts have denied asylum at a steadily rising rate for a decade, and government case records show that climb reaching its highest point yet in 2026, even as the case backlog that grew alongside it has begun, for the first time, to shrink.
A decade of rising denials
AsylumProtection granted to a person already in the United States or at a port of entry who meets the definition of a refugee and cannot safely return to their country.See it in the glossary decisions issued by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the nation’s immigration courts, show the denial rate rising from roughly 58 percent in fiscal year 2016 to about 71 percent in 2019, then to about 74 percent by mid-2020. Court case records compiled from that same agency’s data show the rate at 94 percent by June 2026, the highest point across the ten-year span.
Share of decided asylum cases denied by U.S. Immigration judgeAn attorney appointed by the Attorney General who presides over removal proceedings in immigration court, part of the Executive Office for Immigration Review.See it in the glossary, by fiscal year. Source: EOIR case records.
The case backlog
The case backlog moved on a similar arc before recently reversing. EOIR’s own year-end tallies show 521,417 cases pending at the end of fiscal year 2016, rising past one million for the first time in 2019. A Congressional Research Service review found the backlog reached roughly 3.6 million cases by the end of fiscal year 2024, a level the Government Accountability Office had already flagged years earlier for having more than tripled since the start of fiscal year 2017.
The backlog begins to shrink
That growth has since reversed. Case records through July 2026 put the active backlog at 3,141,306, down from its 2024 peak, with 2,293,984 of those cases involving people who have already filed asylum applications and are waiting on a hearing or decision.
The 2025 hold on new filings
The contraction has coincided with a steep drop in new filings following a nationwide hold on asylum adjudications that USCIS ordered in December 2025. The agency’s own policy memo, PM-602-0192, directed staff to pause all pending Form I-589 asylum applications “regardless of the alien’s country of nationality,” pending what the agency called a comprehensive review, and to place a separate hold on other immigration benefits for nationals of 19 countries named in a Presidential proclamationA formal statement from the President addressed to the public. In immigration, proclamations are often issued under INA 212(f), which lets the President suspend or restrict the entry of noncitizens when the President finds their entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States. The Supreme Court read that authority broadly in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), though courts have said it cannot override other parts of the INA.See it in the glossary. A follow-up memo extended that country list to 39 the following month.
Court challenges to the hold
That hold has since drawn separate court challenges. In one of them, Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled in June that USCIS lacked the legal authority for four distinct policies built on the hold, finding the agency’s freeze “arises solely by the happenstance of their birth” rather than any individual finding, and that Congress had already set a statutory 180-day deadline for asylum decisions that leaves the agency no room to suspend them wholesale. That ruling is now on appeal, following USCIS’s own confirmation that it disagrees with the order but will comply with it pending further review.
Judges and representation
Court staffing has not kept pace with either the historic buildup or the current caseload. EOIR had roughly 578 immigration judges on staff when the backlog first crossed 1.5 million cases in 2022. Case records for fiscal year 2026 show 743 judges deciding asylum cases that year, of whom only 322, or 43 percent, had served before the current administration took office.
Representation has remained a persistent gap across the decade regardless of which administration was in office. Court records for July 2026 show only 22.8 percent of immigrants had an attorney when a removal order was issued, and judges ordered removal or Voluntary departurePermission to leave the United States within a set period, at the person's own expense, instead of being ordered removed. Immigration judges and DHS can grant it, and the person must leave by the deadline the grant sets.See it in the glossary in 82.7 percent of all cases completed so far this fiscal year.
Ten years on, the numbers describe a system reshaped less by any single rule than by an accumulation of them: a court structure built for a fraction of today’s caseload, a denial rate that climbed through multiple administrations before this year’s high, and a legal fight over the latest attempt to pause the system outright that remains unresolved on appeal.