That Backlog Trick Migrants Relied On Is Disappearing Under Trump

President Donald Trump has turned immigration courts into a major tool for his deportation agenda.

Under the Biden administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prosecutors were instructed to allow immigration judges to dismiss cases for migrants who weren’t seen as national security threats. They also allowed millions of illegal immigrants to pour over American borders, creating a massive backlog in the immigration courts that bought migrants time in the United States.

All of that incentivized more illegal immigrants to come to the United States, while allowing them to remain without status during their years-long adjudication.

Word got out and the world came.

“Biden was granting dismissals of cases even when there was no relief available. He was basically giving out ‘get out of deportation free’ cards,” Matthew Kolken, a New York-based immigration attorney, told The Daily Wire.

Now, immigration judges are granting asylum in just 7% of cases, compared to 50% under the Biden administration, the White House said last week.

It’s become so much of a losing battle that Texas-based immigration lawyer Dan Gividen has stopped taking cases in the immigration courts altogether.

“I reached a point where I started telling potential clients, ‘hey, look, I can have my best day … you could have your best day, we could have all the facts that we need in the world, the law on your side, I’m still betting against you winning your case,'” Gividen told The Daily Wire.

One major reason for that is the mass firing of immigration judges who have largely granted asylum at higher rates. More than 100 immigration judges out of roughly 750 have been dismissed under Trump, according to The New York Times.

The fired judges granted asylum in 46% of cases, according to the news outlet. The Trump administration has replaced them with judges who are granting asylum in roughly 6% of cases.

In April 2025, Sirce Owen, the acting director of the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), the Justice Department branch that oversees the immigration courts, produced a memo encouraging immigration judges to toss out asylum claims at a quicker pace and without holding a hearing.

Owen issued another memo in June 2025, threatening “disciplinary action” for immigration judges who exhibit “bias” towards illegal immigrants.

“Judges who would prefer to be policy advocates favoring either aliens or DHS should consider transitioning to alternate career paths,” Owen wrote in the memo.

The slew of actions has reduced the massive immigration court backlog by more than 380,000 cases since Inauguration Day, according to the Department of Justice. As a result, the years-long wait times for illegal immigrants as their cases go through the immigration court system have been reduced.