The White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt reaffirmed this Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will expedite asylum decisions to reduce the backlog inherited from the Biden era.
"The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Donald Trump will expedite decisions on asylum cases in an effort to reduce the substantial backlog left by the administration of former President Joe Biden," it stated.
The announcement comes two days after that entity published a provisional final rule that will allow the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to refer asylum cases directly to immigration judges without the need to interview the applicant first, in an attempt to dismantle the significant backlog that has built up during the Biden administration.
The measure, which takes effect immediately according to the official DHS statement, removes a step that the Trump administration described as a second chance for review that has been used to delay deportations and obtain work permits.
Under the previous scheme, USCIS was required to interview each applicant before deciding whether to approve the case or refer it to an immigration court.
The new regulation eliminates the mandatory interview and also removes the regulatory references to the applicant's "right" to appear before an asylum officer.
According to estimates from the DHS, approximately 444,000 of the nearly 1.4 million pending affirmative asylum cases could be impacted by the change, which could also affect over 132,000 new annual applications.
The director of USCIS, Joseph Edlow, justified the decision with a strong argument: "For too long, the asylum system has been exploited for purposes of delay and work authorization, rather than for legitimate claims of protection."
The system exists to protect individuals who genuinely fear persecution, and this rule will help ensure that resources are allocated for the timely resolution of those applications.
The general counsel of the DHS, James Percival, was more direct in pointing out those who, in his opinion, have collapsed the system: "One of the biggest barriers to the effective enforcement of immigration law is the intentional delay by illegal aliens and the open-border lawyers who represent them. This rule will do exactly what the president ordered."
The backlog that the measure aims to address is of historic proportions: the total number of pending applications—combining cases before USCIS and immigration courts—reached nearly 4 million in April 2026, with the courts recording 3.3 million active cases in March of that year.
The Trump administration attributes this collapse to the policies of the Biden era, during which the backlog of immigration courts grew from 1.2 million at the end of Trump's first term to nearly 3.5 million by the end of fiscal year 2024.
The asylum approval rate reflects the dramatic shift in immigration policy: under Biden, judges granted 48.1% of applications in fiscal year 2023, a figure that plummeted to 8.8% in the first half of fiscal year 2026, the lowest level in over a decade.
This new rule is in addition to other measures that have reconfigured the immigration system: the imposition of an annual fee of $102 for pending applications over one year, the hiring of 120 new immigration judges with accelerated training, and the Supreme Court ruling on June 25, 2026 that authorized the rejection of applicants at the border with Mexico without processing their applications.
UCSIS will accept public comments for 60 days, until September 28, 2026, before issuing a final rule.
The researcher Andrew R. Arthur from the Center for Immigration Studies predicted the direction the system will take: "It is expected that the rejections of asylum will increase and approvals will decrease, both in actual numbers and as a percentage of total decisions, at least while Trump is president."
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