One of President Donald Trump’s immigration chiefs is revealing that asylum fraud ran rampant under the Biden administration, while his agency’s case backlog more than tripled in the space of four years. According to The Daily Caller, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joe Edlow is grappling with a mammoth backlog of asylum applications, worsened by having to identify fraudulent asylum claims. Edlow, who served as USCIS deputy director under the first Trump administration, said that when Trump’s first term ended, “We had about 450,000 cases that were pending on the asylum active docket. When I got back, there were over 1.5 million cases.”

Immigrants arriving at a U.S. port of entry or simply caught crossing the border are legally permitted to apply for asylum, but must do so within one year of arriving in America. In order to grant asylum, the U.S. requires that the applicant be facing a “credible fear” of persecution or death in his home country. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), many illegal immigrants are “coached” to claim “credible fear” in order to evade expedited removal or deportation. When these fraudulent cases are not identified and rejected, either by an asylum officer or an immigration judge, as FAIR stated, they “clog the system and deny legitimate asylum seekers a swift adjudication of their claims.”

The asylum officer is the first hurdle the fraudulent asylum-seeker must overcome. If he can convince the asylum officer that his “credible fear” claims are legitimate, he is then forwarded to an immigration judge, who can find the “credible fear” claims illegitimate and have the immigrant removed. If a fraudulent asylum-seeker fails to pass the asylum officer’s scrutiny, however, he is handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for removal. Even this removal, however, can be halted if the asylum-seeker requests an immigration judge’s review of the asylum officer’s decision.

“What surprised me is they weren’t doing much,” Edlow said of USCIS’s activity during the Biden years, specifically singling out identifying and rejecting fraudulent asylum claims. He continued, “We already knew that there was a misalignment of priorities and resources, but that became painfully obvious that really USCIS was acting as kind of the arm of the administration to help maneuver the parole programs, to do what they could on credible fear[,] and to ultimately try to address the growing border crisis that the Bidens have created.”

Under Biden, millions of illegal immigrants were ushered into the country, largely through the administration’s “parole” program. When border crossers and other illegal immigrants were detained attempting to illegally enter the U.S., they were “paroled” into the country by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In other words, instead of being stopped and detained at the border or port of entry, as had been the norm under Trump’s first administration and even, at times, during Barack Obama’s, the illegal entrants were permitted to await their appointments with asylum officers or immigration judges while roaming the U.S. interior. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to begin revoking parole granted to illegal immigrants by the Biden administration and begin processing parolees for removal. According to Edlow, Biden-era USCIS officials had a “get-to-yes mentality” when processing asylum claims, quickly paroling illegal immigrants into the U.S.

Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies and a former immigration judge, told The Washington Stand, “This is a huge issue. Fraud in the asylum process has been huge for years.” He explained, “One of the issues with asylum is the fact that it is prone to fraud because, in general, you don’t need any extrinsic evidence to prove your claim. You don’t need newspaper articles or police reports or even affidavits from other people in order to prove your claim, your testimony.” He continued, “Most of those claims are largely based on either personal testimony or hearsay, and hearsay is admissible in immigration proceedings.”

“So when you’re talking about 1.5 million asylum applications at USCIS, you have only a handful of FDNS or Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate — you only have a handful of people. And the more that that pile increases, the less they’re actually going to be able to look for fraud,” Arthur observed. “One of the things that the Biden administration did was that they paroled in more than 2.8 million people into the United States under various programs that they had.” The former immigration judge continued, “The idea was that those people would file affirmative asylum applications with the asylum office. Even though the Biden administration attempted to increase the number of asylum officers, I think they got up over a thousand, but they didn’t increase it enough to really handle the flow that they were dumping on the asylum office.” Arthur added, “So you have an application category that is very susceptible to fraud, and you add on to that the fact that you don’t have enough asylum officers, you don’t have enough FDNS officers to screen for fraud, and fraud is going to be rampant.”

Arthur concluded, “The key takeaway is an underfunded agency that, due to Biden administration policies, and millions of border releases, that was pressed to handle a larger caseload without a concomitant increase in its resources.”

In comments to TWS, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said, “Asylum fraud is low risk, high reward because it is easy to commit, rarely discovered, let alone punished, and it provides an ability to stay in the U.S., along with a work permit only six months after applying for asylum.” She continued, “Removing the fraudulent asylum applications and the associated work authorization applications from the DHS and DOJ backlogs would begin a significant decline in the backlogs. Quickly deporting the applicants for immigration fraud would help prevent future asylum fraud.” Ries added that “DHS should not issue work authorization unless and until the underlying immigration benefit is granted, not merely submitted.”

In 2023, under Biden, 54,350 asylum grants were issued, accounting for only 14.4% of asylum applications. This means that less than 15% of asylum applications processed that year were found to be legitimate claims. However, less than 16% of asylum claims were rejected, leaving nearly 70% of asylum claims untouched. By March of 2025, under the second Trump administration, rejection rates had skyrocketed to a record-high 76%.