Trump Oversees Record Level of Rejected Asylum Cases for Migrants

President Donald Trump is overseeing a record percentage of rejected migrant asylum claims, data published by Austin Kocher of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University reveals.

Kocher, who published the data via his Substack, found that in April of this year, federal immigration judges adjudicated a record 11,535 asylum cases for migrants and denied asylum in a record almost 80 percent of such cases.

“On a monthly basis, the percent of asylum cases denied had previously been as low as under 40 percent during the Obama administration and as high as nearly 75 percent during the first Trump administration,” Kocher writes:

In April 2025, about 80 percent of all asylum cases adjudicated resulted in denial. Just one in five asylum seekers in April received some kind of humanitarian relief, the same percentage of NSYNC band members that most of us can name without resorting to Google. [Emphasis added]

The surge in denials from 44 percent to 80 percent denial rate is best visualized using month-to-month denial rates going back to 2001. By comparison, it took roughly seven years, from 2012 to 2019, to cover a similar increase. The immigration courts accomplished that same increase in just 21 months. [Emphasis added]

The large-scale rejection of asylum claims by migrants under Trump comes after former President Joe Biden grew the nation’s foreign-born population by almost seven million in less than four years.

Trump, in addition to what Kocher describes as an “Asylum Denial Machine,” is winding down Biden’s mass migration programs — including a parole pipeline that imported more than 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Similarly, the Supreme Court recently gave Trump the green light to end Biden’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 Venezuelan nationals in the United States who would otherwise be considered deportable aliens.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.