President Donald Trump’s deputies have denied more than 440,000 asylum claims, according to data from the Washington Post.
Many of the claims are from economic migrants.
The Post reported on September 24:
A Washington Post analysis of immigration court records shows immigration judges, who work at the behest of the Justice Department, have ordered more than 440,000 asylum seekers removed during President Donald Trump’s first 19 months back in office — more than during the previous eight years combined.
The judges’ removal orders mean that ICE can quickly return the migrants to their homelands.
The success of this aspect of immigration policy is also shown by TRACReports.org, which shows that Trump’s immigration judges have approved only 5 percent of asylum requests in 2026, down from 50 percent in September 2023. Trump’s 5 percent rate ensures only about 800 approvals and 15,000 denials each month.
Officials are also reducing the massive backlog of 3 million asylum claims created by President Joe Biden’s welcome policies. The backlog hit 3.7 million in 2024, and is falling below 3.1 million, thus shortening the time that asylum claimants can live and work in the United States.
The rapid removal of migrants helps ordinary Americans by nudging up their wages and pushing down their rents.
The asylum wins for Americans match the overwhelming evidence that most Biden-era migrants were not fleeing political threats. Instead, they were rationally walking through the asylum loophole offered by Biden’s business-aligned deputies, including his pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Biden’s deputies released migrants who said they wanted asylum and offered them work permits so they could get jobs quickly to repay their debts to smugglers who helped them get to the United States.
For example, a 2026 survey of border migrants by pro-migration groups showed that only one out of every 27 migrants even claimed to meet the core requirement for winning political asylum in the United States.
Just 3.7 percent of 364 migrants surveyed said they were fleeing because of their “political opinion.” In contrast, 54 percent said they were motivated by “economy and employment” to seek wages in Americans’ workplaces.
The Washington Post article provided what seems to be a case of a migrant rationally exploiting Mayorkas’s welcome. Unlike many poor Ecuadorian migrants, college graduate Grace Calero flew into the United States on a tourist visa in 2023, the Post said:
Her monthly income of about $3,000 per month [in Ecuador] put her among the country’s top earners. But she said she had begun receiving death threats in response to consulting work she had done for local political figures. Though she changed her phone number and took down her social media accounts, Calero said, she continued receiving threatening letters at her home.
… In 2024, she applied for asylum. Her [now 19- year-old] daughter joined her claim the following year. Asylum seekers who do not have a visa or remain in the United States after one [visa] expires are considered unauthorized immigrants.
In Florida, “Calero worked for a marketing company promoting food brands and traveled to different stores around the state,” she told the Post.
Ironically, Calero was detained amid a police investigation that started when her car was smashed by another illegal migrant.
She and her daughter left ICE detention after they agreed to go home amid a rush of publicity in Ecuador.
The Washington Post article, however, hides the huge economic and human cost of Biden’s asylum loophole. In 2023, for example, Breitbart News reported:
“The U.N. Missing Migrants Project estimates at least 349 people either disappeared or died in Caribbean waters last year, nearly twice as many as the year before,” the Post reported on July 27, adding:
“That’s the highest toll since the agency began tracking them in 2014 and is probably an undercount,” said Edwin Viales, a data and research assistant for the U.N. project. “In the bottom of the Caribbean Sea,” Viales said, “there are thousands of remains of migrants who remain unidentified.”
Some of Biden’s asylum-seekers have been charged with and/or convicted of killing American residents in crimes or auto accidents.
“The amount of lives that we’ve saved… by shutting down the border … is already in the thousands,” Trump deputy Stephen Miller told reporters during an April 2025 casual press conference on the White House driveway.
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