Asylum Grant Rates Climb Under Biden

The latest from TRAC Immigration:

“Under the new Biden administration asylum seekers are seeing greater success rates in securing asylum. While asylum denial rates had grown ever higher during the Trump years to a peak of 71 percent in FY 2020, they fell to 63 percent in FY 2021. Expressed another way, success rates grew from 29 percent to 37 percent under President Biden.

However, with the continuing partial court shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a sustained drop in the number of asylum decisions. This means fewer asylum seekers actually won their cases despite this improving success rate. During FY 2021 just 23,827 asylum decisions were made. This is down from 60,079 decisions during FY 2020. These statistics count all decisions rendered on the merits of asylum seekers’ claims.

Even with the greater odds of success, the number of asylum seekers who were granted asylum during FY 2021 was only 8,349 with an additional 402 granted another type of relief in place of asylum. In sheer numbers, this was only about half the number of asylum seekers who had been granted relief during FY 2020. See Figure 1. “

Hat tip to Nolan Rappaport.

KJ