Affirmative Asylum Backlog Exceeds One Million for the First Time

This past June, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published its new “Securing the Border” interim final rule (IFR). One statistic the agency cited that stood out to me was USCIS’s backlog of affirmative asylum cases. Affirmative asylum applications are those that are filed directly with USCIS, rather than as a defense to removal. Often, these applicants are present in the United States lawfully.¹

In the preamble of that IFR, DHS reported that this backlog — for the first time ever — is now above 1.16 million cases and rising. While I, and many others, have already reported that this backlog has been drastically on the rise since the Biden administration took office in January 2021, the administration has been relatively quiet about the true causes of this increase and the agency’s lack of progress with dealing with this backlog.

How Dramatically Has This Backlog Grown?

The affirmative asylum docket and corresponding processing time estimates have grown alarmingly since President Biden took office. At the end of FY 2020 (September 30, 2020), about four months before the change in administrations, the affirmative asylum backlog stood at 336,053 pending cases. By December 31, 2021, the USCIS asylum backlog climbed to 438,500 pending cases, and by December 31, 2022, just one year later, the agency logged 667,040 pending cases (a 57 percent increase from the year prior and a 98.3 percent increase from September 30, 2020). Six months later, in June 2023, the USCIS Ombudsman reported to Congress that the affirmative backlog stood at approximately 842,000 pending cases.

By the end of that year, however, sources from USCIS told me that the backlog had already exceeded one million pending cases. It wasn’t until DHS issued the “Securing the Border” IFR in June 2024 that the public received official confirmation of this data point — and it is almost certainly already out of date.