A Mounting Asylum Backlog and Growing Wait Times

Over four out of every ten Immigration Court cases in which asylum applications have been filed since October 2000 are still pending. That means that of the 1.6 million Court cases in which asylum applications were filed, two-thirds of a million asylum seekers (667,229) are still waiting for hearings to resolve their cases. See Figure 1.

These wait times have ballooned. Current wait times for cases in the asylum backlog now average 1,621 days. This translates into 54 months or nearly four and a half years. See Table 1.

Figure 1. Pending vs. Completed Immigration Court Asylum Cases, FY 2001 – FY 2021