“No fun watching your professional life’s work of 45+ years being destroyed in six months,” one far-left immigration judge told the San Francisco Standard for a September 11 article.
The asylum loophole is being closed because Biden’s 10 million illegal migrants are losing their pleas for asylum and citizenship at record rates.
More illegal migrants are being ordered home, and the backlog of 1.1 million pending asylum cases is being reduced. These courtroom gains complement the administration’s policies of arresting more illegals on the streets and of detaining all new illegal migrants at the U.S. border.
“Between explicit policy changes and implicit threats to get in line or get fired, [asylum] judges on the whole seem to be following [Trump] orders to deny, deny, deny,” wrote academic Austin Kocher.
“This is not an accident—this is a policy decision,” he added.
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“Trump has already turned the ship of the immigration courts in his first 100 days,” wrote Kocher, who is a research assistant professor at Syracuse University and maintains a database of migration-related data.
Trump’s rollback of asylum migration will help to reduce civic and pocketbook costs of migration, which include chaotic diversity, reduced innovation, stalled wages, unaffordable housing, and fewer births.
Kocher’s data show that the appointed judges in the administration’s immigration courts are completing twice as many cases as under President Joe Biden and are also approving asylum pleas at half the rate.
For example, in July 2025, Trump’s judges approved just 20 percent of asylum pleas, down from 57 percent approval in October 2023.
Seventy-five percent of asylum claims heard in July 2025 were rejected, up from just 45 percent in October 2023. That 28-point gain is a two-thirds jump compared to President Joe Biden.
In July 2025, Trump’s judges decided a record of 9,830 asylum cases. Just 1,939 migrants won asylum, while 7,410 claims were rejected.
That is a huge improvement from October 2023, when just 6,237 cases were heard. Biden’s judges approved 3,185 claims and rejected only 2,820 claims.
The upward trend has likely accelerated since July, partly because Trump’s deputies at the Department of Justice are firing far-left and Biden-appointed immigration judges. Many of those judges were rubber-stamping asylum claims, heedless of the civic and economic damage to Americans and to the migrants’ home countries.
MissionLocal.org reported from San Francisco on September 9 on the Justice Department’s decision to fire Loi McCleskey, the assistant chief immigration judge for San Francisco’s immigration courts. “McCleskey had a 70.2 percent rate of granting asylum cases,” the site wrote, adding:
She is the seventh immigration judge in San Francisco to be fired by the Trump administration in recent months, including Shira Levine on Sept. 3 and Chloe S. Dillon in late August. Both Levine and Dillon had high rates of granting asylum.
… Levine granted asylum in 97.9 percent of the cases she received.
Dillon granted asylum in 96.5 percent of cases before her in San Francisco, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse from Syracuse University, which tracked data from 2019 to 2024. She granted another form of relief in 1.4 percent of cases and denied just 2.1 percent of cases.
Trump’s deputies recently fired two pro-migrant asylum judges in New York, TheCity.nyc reported on September 8:
[Judge David] Kim had the highest grant rate for asylum cases among New York City immigration judges, according to TRAC, which compiled data through 2024, while [Judge Carmen Maria ] Rey Caldas had drawn right-wing ire in 2022 for tweets and public statements made when she was an advocate critical of ICE during the first Trump administration’s crackdown. Before becoming an immigration judge in 2022, she worked in nonprofits on legal advocacy for survivors of domestic violence, while Kim worked in private practice as an immigration attorney.
Both of the judges are immigrants. Kim was born in Korea. Rey Caldas was born in Spain.
Many of the fired pro-migration judges are expected to be replaced by 600 military judges on loan from the Department of Defense.
Democrats in Congress are trying to throw a spanner into the works.
“We remain extremely disturbed about the impacts on readiness of using military personnel to perform what are traditionally Department of Justice functions,” says a letter to the Pentagon signed by 12 Democratic Senators. “These [immigration court] actions are inherently law enforcement actions that may not be performed by members of the armed forces,” the Democrats said, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Throughout Biden’s presidency, Democrats claimed that many migrants deserved asylum from threats in their home countries. In reality, most of the poor migrants rationally came to the United States for the decent jobs and greater income offered by the Biden administration.
But the asylum claims helped Democrats and their media allies to hide the Democrats’ policy of extracting poor people from developing countries to fuel Bidenomics and the Democrats’ diversity coalition against ordinary Americans.
The Senators’ letter will likely be used in lawsuits against the transfer of the 600 judges.
Breitbart News
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