This sponsored column is by Law Office of James Montana PLLC. All questions about it should be directed to James Montana, Esq. and Janice Chen, Esq., practicing attorneys at The Law Office of James Montana PLLC, an immigration-focused law firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. The legal information given here is general in nature. If you want legal advice, contact us for an appointment.
Here at Statutes of Liberty, we hate delays and we love data.
So, when we look at the latest data on the asylum backlog, we feel like the Roman poet Catullus: We hate and we love. Then, we feel compelled to explain. That, in a nutshell, is what these advertorials are here for.
In this brief article, we’ll discuss both the nationwide asylum data and local data from our very own Arlington Asylum Office. The nationwide data is available here. The local data is known to us via discussions with other practitioners and generous disclosures by the Arlington Asylum Office.
Keep in mind that these are what immigration lawyers call affirmative asylum applications — applications made at the Asylum Office as a matter of choice. Defensive asylum applications which are made in Immigration Court before an Immigration Judge are a completely separate data set.
In total, USCIS’s Asylum Directorate completed 117,876 cases in FY2024 YTD. That’s the good news — savor it. The bad news is that 386,150 applications were received over the same period, so the backlog grew by more than 268,000 cases. More than two people are getting into the queue for every person who exits the queue. And, of course, one person applying for asylum often is the primary applicant for an entire family.
The backlog is simply enormous. It’s more than a million cases now — and, if it continues to grow by a quarter-million per year, people who are in the queue for an interview now simply won’t ever have their cases heard. (This view is shared both by both sides of the immigration debate.) In theory, at least, the system is LIFO: Last In, First Out, so the newest cases get heard first, and the older cases only get heard if more cases are adjudicated than received.
Asylum offices differ quite markedly across the nation in their productivity. New Orleans, for example, sometimes adjudicates less than a hundred applications per month; Miami averages just under three thousand applications per month. Our own Arlington Asylum Office — which covers an enormous geographical range, from the shores of Lake Erie in Western Pennsylvania, right down to the Alabama shoreline with the Gulf of Mexico — completed just under 1,500 cases per month during FY2024 YTD.
The Arlington Asylum Office has about 140,000 pending cases, and about eighty officers who are devoted to the affirmative asylum docket. That’s 1,750 cases per officer, with more coming in every day. Our experience is that an asylum interview generally takes about half a day to complete.
Assuming, optimistically, that an asylum officer can actually complete two cases per day, and assuming (falsely) that not a single new case comes in the door, the current staff would be able to clear the backlog in about four and a half years.
Unfortunately, about 4500 new cases come into the Arlington Asylum Office each month, so there’s simply no way that the Arlington Asylum Office can keep up with the new work, never mind start to chew through the backlog.
We have no policy recommendations to offer here. We’re just here to report the facts — and the facts are unsustainable.
As always, we are grateful for your questions and comments, and will do our best to respond.
