Since President Biden took office, the number of affirmative action asylum applications and the estimated processing times have grown at an alarming rate. At the end of fiscal year 2020 (September 30, 2020), about four months before the change in administration, there were 336,053 pending affirmative action asylum cases. As of December 31, 2021, that number had risen to 438,500 pending cases. As of December 31, 2022, a year later, the number reached 667,040 pending cases, an increase of 57% from the previous year and 98.3% from September 2020. Six months later, in June 2023, the USCIS Ombudsman reported to Congress that there were approximately 842,000 pending cases. Now, in June 2024, it has been confirmed that asylum cases have surpassed 1.6 million.
There are three main reasons why the affirmative asylum backlog has grown so large:
Expansion of Parole Programs: The expansion of parole programs under the Biden administration has allowed entry to a large number of individuals who would otherwise be inadmissible to the U.S. Parole programs such as Operation Allies Welcome, Uniting for Ukraine, and others for nationals of various countries have temporarily admitted hundreds of thousands of individuals. These individuals, once admitted, often apply for asylum if they wish to remain beyond their parole period. Because parole recipients are generally not subject to immediate removal, their incentive to apply for asylum, which is affirmatively processed by USCIS, contributes to the growing backlog.
Change to the Credible Fear Rule: In March 2022, the Biden administration issued a rule allowing USCIS asylum officers to handle credible fear cases, which were previously handled by immigration courts. This rule, which allows asylum officers to make final decisions on asylum claims submitted defensively during credible fear screenings, has increased USCIS’s workload. Although the agency was initially slow to broadly adopt this authority due to resource constraints, it has since increased its use, which is contributing to the backlog.
Impact of the Border Crisis: The ongoing crisis at the border has forced USCIS to redirect resources to deal with the surge in asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. This has involved reallocating asylum officers from their usual affirmative asylum duties to conduct credible fear screenings for new arrivals at the border. This shift has further increased pressure on USCIS, making it more difficult to manage and reduce the affirmative asylum backlog, as noted by the USCIS Ombudsman.
Source: https://cis.org/Jacobs/Affirmative-Asylum-Backlog-Exceeds-One-Million-First-Time
