The asylum approval rate in U.S. immigration courts hit 10 percent in December 2025 — down from slightly more than 50 percent in fall 2023 under the Biden administration. That's not a marginal adjustment. It's a structural correction to a system that had been operating as an open door dressed up in legal language.

Data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows an 80 percent drop in asylum approvals in late 2025. Judges issued 150,000 final orders of deportation between October and December alone. At that pace, 2026 could see at least 600,000 final deportation orders — a throughput that would begin putting a real dent in the roughly 3.5 million outstanding asylum cases clogging the system.

Only 3 percent of illegal immigrants are now being legally allowed to stay.

The Rubber-Stamp Era Ends

According to Breitbart, to understand what 10 percent means, you have to understand what 50 percent means. For years, the asylum system functioned less as a legal process and more as a processing queue — one that moved slowly enough to let millions settle into American communities, take jobs, and effectively disappear into the country regardless of outcome. Case processing times exceeded 1,100 days in 2022. By late 2025, that figure dropped to under 700 days. Faster processing means faster answers, and faster answers mean the system can no longer be gamed through delay alone.

The judges who presided over the old regime tell the story plainly. Judge Lawrence O. Burman, a Democrat-appointed immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia, granted asylum to 90 percent of the 481 migrants who came through his courtroom. He had a retirement party on February 4. An online newsletter shared by migration lawyers described him as the "gold standard" for immigration judges — fair, impartial, expert.

A 90 percent approval rate is many things. "Impartial" is a stretch.

Then there's Judge Maureen O'Sullivan, appointed to the bench in 2010 by Barack Obama's Attorney General, who previously worked for the National Lawyers Guild. Between 2020 and 2025, she approved 91 percent of 1,145 asylum pleas. She retired in mid-2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi is expected to continue removing older judges who maintained similar approval rates, which should push the numbers even lower in 2026.

Federal law largely limits asylum to people who can demonstrate they suffer from official repression — political persecution, religious targeting, government-directed violence. That standard was never meant to cover everyone fleeing a bad economy or a rough neighborhood. Yet for years, the approval rates suggested judges were applying something far more generous than the statute on the books.

What the New Numbers Actually Mean

The shift isn't blanket cruelty. It's the difference between applying the law as written and applying it as activists wished it read. Consider: Guang Heng, a Chinese man who filmed the Chinese government's detention of Muslims in Xinjiang province, was recently granted asylum by Trump-appointed judges. That's exactly the kind of case the system was designed for — someone with a documented, specific, government-directed threat to their life.

90 percent of cases now being denied weren't Guang Heng's. Roughly 2.3 million migrants have pending asylum cases. At least 1.6 million already have final orders and remain in the United States. Of those, approximately 800,000 have criminal convictions. These aren't abstractions. They're people the system already told to leave — and who didn't.

The prior administration's approach was to offer migrants the ability to apply for asylum and legally work until their court date, which often arrived years later. That created a perverse incentive structure: cross the border, claim asylum, get a work permit, and settle in. Whether the claim had merit was almost beside the point. The process itself was the prize.

The Pressure Campaign

Immigration advocates are raising alarms about what happens inside detention facilities. Aaron Reichlin Melnick of the American Immigration Council described the dynamic in a February 12 conversation with Bill Kristol:

"Suddenly, you're thrown in detention. You're away from your job, you're away from your family, you're away from your [lawyer] resources. And there's an ICE officer coming to you every single day in detention and saying, 'You can get out today if you sign on this paper and give up your right to a day in court … they say, we'll give you $2,000, we'll give you $3,000 if you just sign this and go away.'"

Reichlin Melnick added:

"I've heard reports of offers as high as $5,000 for people to give up and not get their day in court."

Set aside the framing for a moment. What's actually being described? The government is offering people who entered the country illegally a cash payment to voluntarily depart rather than consume months or years of court resources pursuing claims that now succeed only 10 percent of the time. For the 90 percent whose claims would be denied anyway, a few thousand dollars and a plane ride home is arguably a better outcome than grinding through a system that ends in a deportation order.

The complaint amounts to this: enforcement is working, and it's uncomfortable. That was always going to be the case. A system that processed millions of people with minimal consequences for years was never going to be corrected painlessly.

The Bigger Picture

Since the Obama era, Democratic leaders allowed millions of economic migrants to enter the asylum pipeline and compete against Americans for wages and housing. The legal architecture of asylum — designed for political dissidents, religious minorities, and people facing genuine persecution — was repurposed into a general immigration channel. The backlog ballooned. The courts choked. And the distinction between legitimate refugees and people seeking better economic opportunities dissolved into irrelevance.

What's happening now is the reassertion of that distinction. At least 15 million illegal immigrants are estimated to be in the country. The asylum system cannot process them all, and it was never supposed to. The 10 percent approval rate isn't evidence of a broken system — it's evidence of one that stopped pretending every claim deserved approval.

The judges who granted asylum at 90-plus percent rates are retiring or being replaced. The cases are moving faster. The deportation orders are stacking up. For the first time in years, the word "no" carries consequences.

That's not a crisis. That's the law, remembering what it says.