I’ve sat through enough depositions to know that a number without context is a trap. So here’s the number everyone’s quoting. Immigration judges denied 94% of asylum cases decided in June and granted 5.5%, the lowest rate in the records kept by Syracuse University’s TRAC data project. I think the asylum courts needed a reset, and they got one. But a reset built on firings and precedents lasts only as long as the people hold the pen. Congress should write the rules down.
Start with the baseline. TRAC reports the grant rate sat above 50% earlier in Joe Biden’s term and had slid to 32% by the time he left. The decline began before this administration. Measuring 32%, the fall to 5.5% is about 83%, and June is one month. TRAC does say the drop has generally accelerated.
The Justice Department changed the bench first. TRAC counts 279 immigration judges fired or resigned across fiscal 2025 and 2026, about 38% of the bench, and NPR tallied nearly 100 firings in 2025 alone. Replacements followed. In May, the department swore in 77 permanent and five temporary judges, its largest class ever, and most of them came from ICE, prosecutors’ offices, or the military. Congress helped pay for it with a spending bill that sent more than $3 billion to justice for immigration work, including judge hiring.
Then the rulebook moved. TRAC followed 130 judges who decided asylum cases every year from fiscal 2021 through 2026. Three-fourths denied more in 2026 than in 2021, by an average 33 points. TRAC’s numbers don’t isolate the cause, and docket mix matters, but the pattern held among judges who never left. Last month, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that a judge may toss an asylum application on the written record without waiting for the Department of Homeland Security to request it. The logic is plain enough. If the facts on paper wouldn’t win even when every word is believed, a hearing adds nothing.
Speed matters because the line is enormous. TRAC counts about 3.1 million pending cases, roughly 2.3 million of them asylum applications, and the typical pending case had waited about 636 days as of last December. The department says it has trimmed the docket by more than 485,000 cases since January 2025.
Critics have a point on causation. TRAC cautions that denial rates reflect each judge’s docket, representation, and nationality, and a low grant rate doesn’t prove a denied claim was weak or fraudulent. Former judges told NPR the firings weaken the rule of law, and advocates argue that skipping hearings denies applicants their day in court. I take both concerns seriously. But immigration judges are Justice Department employees, and unlike federal judges, the president can remove them. Elections are supposed to produce this kind of change.
That is the weakness. Aristotle wrote that the law is reason unaffected by desire. Hiring practices and Board precedents move with each administration, and reasonable people on both sides should want something steadier. I spent years running youth rugby across Southern California, where a referee who rewrote the laws at halftime would hear about it from every parent on the touchline.
SALVATION LIES WITHIN A SEALED ENVELOPE
Four changes would do it. Congress should write the screening standard into the Immigration and Nationality Act, so one Board decision can’t flip it. It should set a minimum level of immigration-law experience for temporary judges, since the department dropped that requirement to bring in military lawyers. It should require a short, written reason whenever a judge skips a hearing, which answers the day-in-court objection. And it should require quarterly, judge-level data on grants, denials, and representation, which TRAC now pries loose through Freedom of Information Act requests. Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913 that sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. It works for both parties.
The next administration will have ideas of its own. Congress should make sure it has to ask first.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
