Immigration judges installed permanently since President Trump returned to office approved 2% of the asylum applications that came before them from October 2025 through August 2026, and denied 49%, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis published October 13. Judges appointed before 2025 who remained on the bench denied 41% over the same period. The new judges also ordered people deported more often: a 79% removal-order rate through late July, against roughly 74% for earlier judges. The Justice Department, which runs the immigration courts, says it is hiring "talented legal professionals who are committed to protecting national security and public safety" to cut a backlog of roughly 3 million cases, and supporters of the administration argue most recent applicants had weak claims. But the shift is not only about new hires. The research group TRAC found that three of every four judges who served throughout the past six years have also raised their asylum denial rates, by an average of 33 percentage points.
What the numbers measure
The 2% and 49% figures are shares of all asylum applications the new judges resolved. Most of the rest were not decided on the merits: they were "abandoned, paused, or withdrawn," Bloomberg Law reported. That is why its figures differ from TRAC's, which count only cases a judge actually decided. On TRAC's measure, judges nationwide granted asylum in 5.5% of decisions in June 2026 and denied it in 94.1%. In June, 771 people were granted asylum, less than a quarter of the number three years earlier. Bloomberg Law put the overall grant rate at a record low of 3% of applications, down from 17% in the first month of Trump's second term. The 79% figure is the rate at which the new permanent judges ordered people removed, according to Bloomberg Law; it is not a share of asylum cases. Across all judges, the removal rate reached 82% in August, above the first-term peak of nearly 78% in February 2020.
Case mix affects all of these rates. TRAC notes that denial rates depend on the kinds of cases a judge hears and on whether the people before them are detained, among other factors outside a judge's control. Bloomberg Law found that permanent judges overall order removal more often, nearly 80%, than temporary ones, about 62%; Anam Petit, a former immigration judge fired last year, said that may be partly because permanent judges are assigned more often to detention dockets, where people have fewer ways to win relief. Bloomberg Law's analysis used government data compiled by the nonprofit Mobile Pathways and covers judges appointed through July 29; there is little data yet on judges hired in August and September.
A remade bench
The administration has added nearly 400 temporary and permanent judges since October 2025, replacing roughly 200 who left or were fired, according to Bloomberg Law. TRAC counts 279 judges fired or resigned in fiscal years 2025 and 2026, about 38% of the 735 employed at the end of fiscal 2024, the last full year of the Biden administration. At least 180 of the new hires have served as military lawyers or in other military roles, and about 120 have prior immigration experience, most of them as lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security. The department dropped its earlier requirement of seven years of relevant legal experience. Judges now work under a September 2025 policy memo that expects most cases of people not in detention to be finished within a year and detained cases within 60 days, and under a Board of Immigration Appeals decision allowing a judge to reject an asylum application without a hearing even if the government has not asked for that.
The two sides read this differently. "Most of those people had no basis for applying for admission to the United States," said Matt O'Brien, deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tighter immigration limits. "Reducing the immigration court backlog remains one of the highest priorities for this administration," a Justice Department spokesperson said, blaming the previous administration for letting "millions of unvetted migrants" into the country. Former judges see pressure from above. "A lot of these judges are very quickly ordering individuals removed, pretermitting applications because they're following the guidance that's being provided to them," said Amiena Khan, a former assistant chief immigration judge in New York who was fired last year; pretermitting means rejecting an application without a hearing. Petit said the hiring is "sending a clear signal that they don't want anyone who represented immigrants previously."
The cases reaching federal court
The crackdown has also flooded the regular federal courts, where people challenge their detention and the government defends itself. By this summer more than 144,000 civil cases were pending in federal district courts, nearly 72% more than in January 2025, according to an analysis of Justice Department caseload data by David McConnell, who directed the department's Office of Immigration Litigation for 14 years before retiring in 2025. Immigration cases were 54% of new civil filings in January 2026 and 58% in March, against about 17% a month from 2021 to early 2025. Many are habeas corpus petitions from people held under the administration's new position that anyone who crossed the border without inspection, even years ago, must be detained. More than 67,000 immigration cases were filed between January 2025 and July 2026, McConnell found. The Hill reported this week on internal Justice Department documents describing the strain on the lawyers who defend these cases; Profoundd could not access that article to check its figures.
Sources: Bloomberg Law, October 13, 2026; TRAC, "Asylum Denials Rise to 94% Amid the Remaking of the Immigration Court", August 31, 2026; Justice Connection (David McConnell), "Immigration Cases Drive Crushing Workloads for DOJ Attorneys in Trump's Second Term", September 24, 2026.