Nearly 80 percent of migrants seeking asylum in the US were sent packing in the last quarter, as immigration judges take a tougher line under the Trump administration, which has made it a priority to restore the border.
In that same span there’s been an accompanying spike in deportations. In December, there were 38,215 illegal migrants given the boot, 50% above the 19,265 in December 2023 under President Joe Biden and 35% more than the 24,979 in December 2024, according to data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
And the enforcement has been sustained, with more than 30,000 deportations every month since Trump took office.
“It’s having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate,” said Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Services, cheered the return of common-sense border policy.
“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 told The Post.
“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,” he added.
The hard line is a far cry from the open-door border policy of the Biden years, which saw judges granting a staggering 50% of asylum claims in May 2022, during a year when Customs and Border Protection reported a record-breaking total of 2.76 million people crossed the southern border.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people,” Biden said at an Iowa campaign event in 2019. “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.”
Trump tapped into the public outrage by using his campaign rallies to highlight senseless killings of Americans like Laken Riley, who was killed by an illegal migrant while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024.
Last year, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, an illegal migrant from El Salvador was given a life sentence for the 2023 savage rape and murder of Maryland mom of five Rachel Morin.
“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,” Rachel’s mom Patricia Morin told The Post this week.
“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.”
She continued: “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.”
Maureen Maloney, who has pushed for tighter borders since the death of her son Matthew Denice, 23, who was killed in Milford, Mass. by a drunk-driving illegal migrant from Ecuador in 2011.
“What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come,” said Maloney, vice president of the group Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime.
“It’s impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration,” she told The Post.
Plummeting asylum approvals mirror the rising public frustration over illegal immigration. Asylum grant rates remained at 50 percent much of 2023 — as Customs and Border Patrol reported being swamped by more than 2.4 million migrants at the Southwest border with 3.2 million so-called “encounters” nationwide.
Only when national polls showed in August 2023 that 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden’s handling of the border — and as he geared up for an ultimately disastrous run at a second term — did the number of asylum grants decline slightly. By 2024, the rate was 40%.
A December Department of Homeland Security release said there were average apprehensions at the border of just 245 per day – a stunning 95% drop from the average during the Biden administration of 5,110 per day.
Asylum decisions are made in immigration courts overseen by officials designated by the Justice Department, who collectively shape the numbers. The Trump administration has been stocking immigration courts with judges from military backgrounds. This month DOJ hired 33 new immigration judges, after hiring 36 in October.
The Pentagon has also been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts for temporary assignments to address the backlog.
The administration also fired in excess of 100 immigration judges over the past year.
The New York Bar Association expressed “deep concern” over the firings.
But the Justice Department trumpeted the judicial turnover. “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 decision-making process is typically slow-moving, with a courtroom slog stretching well beyond a decade to resolve the cases already on the books.
One feature of the Trump administration has been an increase in speed. In April and May, completed cases hit 12,000 per month, compared to monthly completed caseloads of just 6,000 to 7,000 under Biden, according to TRAC.
Still, the backlog of asylum claims has reached a mountainous 3.38 million — and would take 14 years to process even at the current, accelerated rates.
New York is a big part of the load. Queens County is third in the country for the immense size of its backlog, with 105,635 cases.
The countries the migrants are sent back to reflect the geography, poverty, and drug wars that officials say are driving migration to the US.
The greatest number who lost in court get sent to Mexico, which accepts migrants from there and from some third countries. The other top destinations are Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order.
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