WASHINGTON – In the year since Trump tried to deport more people, approval rates for asylum seekers have dropped as immigrants become more afraid of appearing in court.
Less than 3% of asylum cases decided in January were granted — a record low, according to Mobile Pathways, a San Francisco nonprofit that analyzes federal immigration data. That compares to an approval rate of 18% in January 2025.
Nationally, 20% of asylum seekers missed their hearings in January, compared to half that rate last year. Asylum seekers with pending applications are in the country legally, but under federal law, failure to appear for a hearing can result in a warrant being issued.
In the immigration courts of Los Angeles County – among the largest in the country – the trend is even more shocking: no matches made up 56% of asylum hearings in January, compared to 14% the previous year.
“That’s not a change,” said Bartlomiej Skorupa, chief operating officer at Mobile Pathways. “That’s falling.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the Trump administration is restoring integrity to the immigration courts.
As of December, about 3.4 million cases were pending in immigration courts, and more than 2.3 million of them were asylum cases, according to TRAC, a data research organization.
The rise in the number of people avoiding asylum hearings helps explain another trend in the immigration court system. Last year, the number of asylum cases marked “abandoned” doubled.
Immigration lawyers say cases can be classified as abandoned for a variety of reasons: The applicant missed the deadline, filled out the form incorrectly, or simply decided to leave the US.
But the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that oversees the immigration courts, can label a case dismissed if an applicant fails to appear for a hearing. Nationwide, the number of cases deemed abandoned doubled last year to nearly 41% of those decided in January.
It takes an average of four years for immigrants to receive an asylum hearing, although a final decision can take longer with appeals, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
During the Biden administration, many asylum claims were not decided by the immigration judge; instead, many were administratively closed, or temporarily suspended and removed from the judges’ dockets. Even if the case is not valid, the person can stay in the US, work legally and pursue other forms of assistance.
But such a policy is at risk of being reversed by the next administration, experts at the Migration Policy Institute wrote in a November report.
Lindsay Toczylowski, founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles, said the increase in illegal immigration is partly because the Trump administration has begun reopening asylum cases that had been legally closed for years.
Many of those people no longer have contact with their attorney, if they have one, and it can be difficult to notify them of a new trial.
Ten years ago, the majority of asylum seekers came from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras, many of whom settled in Southern California.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, Los Angeles was one of the first cities where federal agents began arresting immigrants in court. Immigrants are now afraid to interact with any law enforcement authorities, Toczylowski said.
He said the government’s goal “isn’t due process or the pursuit of justice for people in immigration court — it’s deportation orders. If people don’t come to court, that’s a way for them to meet their goals.”
Immigration courts are part of the Department of Justice and judges have long complained that they are not fully independent from executive branch abuses. The department disputes that, saying that judges are independent judges who decide cases individually.
More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump took office and about the same number have resigned or resigned, according to the union that represents immigration judges. That’s down from 735 judges in the previous fiscal year.
Last summer, the Pentagon authorized about 600 military lawyers to work for the Justice Department after removing a requirement for part-time immigration judges to have experience in immigration law.
Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge who was fired last year from the San Francisco Immigration Court, said the 3% asylum grant rate in January was incredibly low.
Johnson, former vice president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said the decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals in the past few months have the asylum law. Immigration judges must follow the precedent set in those cases.
One such example, for example, is reversing previous definitions to now limit asylum based on gender, finding that claims of persecution based solely on gender, or gender combined with nationality, generally do not meet the definition of a “particular social group” — one of the five categories under US asylum law.
Another factor contributing to the reduction in asylum applications, he said, is that the federal government has begun seeking to withdraw asylum cases by forcing immigrants to start in a “safe third country.”
The requests stem from a growing number of so-called cooperative asylum agreements, which allow federal officials to send certain migrants to other countries — including less stable places like Honduras, Uganda and Ecuador — instead of continuing to seek asylum in the US.
“It’s really been a barrier to finding shelter and other related protections,” he said.
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, one of the authors of the Migration Policy Institute’s report, pointed to a post last month on X by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who said asylum is “limited to people fleeing the smallest categories of federal persecution.”
“None of the groups that cross the border illegally follow that path,” Miller wrote. “No one in Mexico or Ecuador or Honduras etc lives in countries where there is state persecution of any protected class.”
But Bush-Joseph cautioned that it is not yet clear whether the Trump administration’s asylum reforms are legal.
“Although there are measures by the administration that prevent people from getting asylum, those are being challenged in court and I don’t think we know how all this will go,” he said. “A lot of people are being deported right now and they may not get a chance to come back.”
