The Trump administration enacted a rule on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, allowing U. S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services to bypass initial officer interviews and send asylum applicants directly to immigration court for deportation proceedings.
Federal officials designed the immediate measure to reduce the nation's 1.4 million pending asylum backlog by nearly a third, expecting the change to impact roughly 440,000 cases.
Under previous guidelines, USCIS officers personally interviewed applicants, reviewed evidence, and held authority to grant asylum before any court referral.
The updated rule permits authorities to skip this evaluation entirely, relying solely on written applications to transfer files to court, where Department of Homeland Security attorneys represent the government.
The policy targets claims submitted past the one-year deadline—comprising over 30 percent of backlogged cases—alongside applications deemed deficient by individual officers.
DHS projects that courts will receive approximately 132,167 new cases annually without prior interviews, affecting both new submissions and pending cases awaiting initial interviews.
Although court referral is not an immediate deportation order, immigration judges retain authority to dismiss applications without holding evidentiary hearings.
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents continue arresting individuals whose cases are dismissed in court halls, while the administration has replaced over 100 immigration judges with military lawyers and former prosecutors.
USCIS Director Defends Policy
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow defended the directive in an official statement addressing the systemic backlog.
"For too long, the asylum system has been used to delay proceedings and obtain work permits, rather than to present legitimate claims for protection," said Joseph Edlow, Director of USCIS.
"The United States asylum system exists to protect individuals who truly fear persecution, and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed toward resolving those claims in a timely manner, rather than benefiting those seeking to use the system as a legal loophole."
The agency noted it will accept public comments on the immediate policy before issuing a finalized rule.
Rights advocates criticized the policy shift for eliminating standard procedural evaluations for vulnerable populations fleeing foreign persecution.
"The ultimate impact of making this change certainly seems to be to try to reject as many cases as possible, without regard to the fairness of the determination," said Doris Meissner, Director of the U.
S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
The policy builds upon presidential proclamations barring border asylum entries and recent Supreme Court rulings holding that migrants detained on the Mexican side of the border have not officially arrived in the United States.
