
Nearly 3 Million Backlogged Cases in Immigration Courts Driven By a Surge in Bogus Asylum Claims

One of the key Republican demands that has held up approval of President Biden’s foreign aid request is an overhaul of our widely abused asylum system. The urgency of reforming that broken system is illustrated by an eyepopping number: 2,930,000. That’s the number of cases pending in our nation’s beleaguered immigration courts – a tenfold increase in just the last decade, and double the number of backlogged cases since President Biden took office three years ago. This surge in pending cases that is crippling the immigration courts has been driven by huge increases in new asylum claims.
The exponential growth in asylum claims has little to do with worsening human rights or political conditions in other countries. Rather, it has everything to do with growing recognition around the world that arriving in the United States illegally and filing an asylum claim – no matter how specious – all but guarantees that you will be allowed to enter the country, be granted multi-year work authorization within months of filing, and remain here for many years before you ever have your day in front of an immigration judge. It is also driven by the knowledge that if you do not show up for your court date there will likely be no repercussions and, even if you show up and your asylum claim is denied, there is little chance you will be removed from the country.
Swamping the immigration courts is also a strategy of the open-borders advocacy network. The bigger the backlogs, the longer bogus asylum claimants get to remain here. The longer they remain here, the more likely they are to be able to establish other claims to be allowed to stay based on “having put down roots” in this country, such as having U.S.-born kids. An immigration court system collapsing under its own weight also provides new arguments for the need to wipe the slate clean by granting mass amnesty to just about everyone who is here illegally.
Rather than take decisive steps to end the abuses that have created a court docket nearly 3 million cases long, the Biden administration is doing precisely the opposite. They are facilitating more abuse with actions such as extending the validity of work authorization from two to five years for asylum applicants, which only makes a frivolous application more attractive to an alien whose true motivation for entering the U.S. is economic, not to flee persecution. The administration is also encouraging the use of a phone app, known as CBP One, that allows migrants who do not have visas to enter the United States to schedule appointments at legal ports of entry. More often than not, these illegal aliens are allowed to cross the border where they join the ever-growing number of people pursuing frivolous asylum claims. Additionally, the administration has created new country-specific parole programs – without any statutory authority to do so – that allows citizens of these countries to fly directly to the United States, where they can join the ever-expanding backlog of people filing claims to remain permanently.
For years, FAIR has warned of the dangers of large-scale asylum abuse and called for reforms. In the last few years we have moved from large-scale abuse to industrial-scale abuse that now imperils the integrity of the judicial system and the security of the nation. It is a key reason why FAIR is pushing for policy changes such as those in the House-approved H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, which would raise the “credible fear” standard for claiming asylum, and FAIR has strongly backed efforts to include the language of that bill in the president’s foreign aid package, or in legislation to fund the federal government.
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