Immigration Judges Issued Nearly 500K Removal Orders in FY 2025

With the government shutdown behind us, agencies — including the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the DOJ component that oversees the immigration courts — have begun updating their statistics. One stands out: In FY 2025, immigration judges (IJs) issued nearly half a million removal orders, boosted by the 300,000-plus aliens who failed to appear in court, and a denied a whopping 82,263 asylum claims. Rounding up those aliens will keep ICE plenty busy for a while, but those figures explain why the agency isn’t — and can’t be — focused solely on so-called “criminals”.

A “Due Process” Refresher

The term “due process” gets tossed around like a legal incantation, but in the immigration context it means any number of things.

For aliens encountered by CBP at the borders and the ports without proper admission documents, it can mean DHS’s compliance with “expedited removal” procedures in section 235(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which permit CBP officers and Border Patrol agents to issue removal orders for aliens who fail to demonstrate a “credible fear” of persecution or torture.

CBP must send aliens subject to expedited removal who receive a “positive credible fear determination” from a USCIS asylum officer or IJ to immigration court for “regular” removal proceedings under section 240 of the INA. The rest are simply removed, and the Supreme Court has held that’s all the “process” those aliens are “due”.

Similarly, for aliens who were admitted under the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) in section 217 of the INA and overstayed (and a handful of others), due process means a DHS-issued removal order unless, again, they show a fear of persecution or torture, in which case they are sent to immigration court for “asylum-only” proceedings.

Due process can also be as simple as a reinstatement of a prior removal order (under section 241(a)(5) of the INA) unless (again) such aliens claim a fear of persecution or torture; then, it means they are sent to “withholding-only” proceedings before an immigration judge.

In asylum-only and withholding-only proceedings, the removability of the alien is not at issue — they have either waived their right to removal proceedings or are deemed removable by law, and that’s “due process” as well.

Rather, the only issue in such “special proceedings” is whether those aliens are eligible for asylum, “statutory withholding” under section 241(b)(3) of the INA, or protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT) — they may not seek other forms of relief or privileges under the INA.

Most other aliens (and, as noted, aliens in expedited removal who receive “positive credible fear determinations”), however, receive due process when DHS places those “respondents” into removal proceedings during which IJs determine whether they are removable and, if so, are eligible for any protection or benefit that would allow them to remain in the United States.

EOIR “FY 2025 Decision Outcomes”

Which brings me to an EOIR web page captioned “FY 2025 Decision Outcomes”, updated on November 18. It provides statistics on the outcomes of those removal proceedings, asylum-only proceedings, and withholding-only proceedings in immigration court.

In D.C. terms, September 30 is the last day of the fiscal year, and thus “FY 2025 Decision Outcomes” provides a picture of how IJs ruled in the past fiscal year. And what a story that picture tells.

In FY 2025, IJs issued 485,456 removal orders at the end of section 240 removal proceedings, a nearly 57 percent increase compared to FY 2024 (just under 310,000 section 240 removal orders).

Of those nearly half-million removal orders, more than 306,500 were issued to respondents in absentia, when they failed to appear in immigration court, up from just over 223,000 no-show removal orders in FY 2024 — a 39-percent year-over-year rise.

In that vein, remember that DHS and EOIR are only obligated to provide aliens with the opportunity to receive due process in immigration court; if respondents fail to take the government up on the offer, that’s their problem.

Reasons for the Increase

Two reasons explain both the increase in removal orders and the rise in in absentia removal orders over the past fiscal year.

Note that the Biden administration had a policy of terminating or dismissing cases involving respondents who were removable but weren’t eligible for “relief” from removal (like asylum).

In October 2024, the House Judiciary Committee revealed that under that policy, “more than 700,000 illegal aliens … had their cases dismissed, terminated, or administratively closed, allowing those aliens to stay in the country indefinitely without facing immigration consequences”, in what the committee aptly termed a “quiet amnesty”.

Trump II quickly reversed that policy, meaning that if a respondent is in proceedings today and doesn’t have a favorable claim, that alien is almost definitely going to be ordered removed.

Second, many if not most of the six million-plus inadmissible aliens encountered by CBP and released into the United States (in violation of the INA) by the last administration — usually referred to over the last four years as “asylum seekers” by the Biden White House and the press — never intended to seek asylum or any other protection here.

There’s no reason to go to immigration court if you can’t give the IJ any legitimate reason to allow you to stay, and in hundreds of thousands of cases last year, respondents didn’t.

Of course, DHS under Trump II has also been arresting certain respondents when they appear for their removal proceedings, which has likely given countless respondents plenty of incentive to skip court.

Again, however, those aliens are entitled to the process they are due, and the government will ensure they receive it — they might just be detained throughout that process.

Given the fact, as noted, that the INA required most of them to be detained to begin with, they can hardly complain when DHS subsequently takes them into custody and gives them due process while in detention.

Asylum-Only and Withholding-Only Cases

To round out the EOIR “decision outcome” statistics, IJs in FY 2025 denied protection in 1,655 asylum-only and withholding-only cases, and an additional 1,295 respondents in those proceedings either withdrew or abandoned their protection requests (which is the same as a denial) boosting the final order count by an additional 2,950.

Interestingly, that’s a nearly 32-percent decline in denials, withdrawals, and abandonments in asylum-only and withholding-only cases compared to FY 2024 (4,308). The likely reason for that decline is that fewer aliens previously deported have reentered illegally under Trump II than did under Biden, so IJs have fewer “withholding-only” cases to consider.

“Asylum Decisions”

Finally, the number of respondents who did appear in removal proceedings seeking asylum who saw their protection claims denied jumped — “bigly” as the president used to say — in FY 2025.

According to the EOIR “Asylum Decisions” web page, IJs denied more than 82,250 asylum applications in FY 2025, more than twice as many as in FY 2024 (just over 38,500 denials) and the largest recorded number of yearly asylum denials (records go back a decade).

In fact, that FY 2025 denial total is 12 percent higher than in the prior two fiscal years combined (73,156 denials), even though 15 times more illegal migrants were apprehended at the Southwest border (the main source of asylum claims of late) in FY 2023 and 2024 combined than last fiscal year.

Again, the main drivers of that increase are: (1) most of the “asylum seekers” released at the border under Biden and placed into removal proceedings lacked grantable asylum claims; and (2) Trump’s DHS isn’t asking IJs to terminate and dismiss worthless claims like Biden’s did (see “quiet amnesty”).

There are other factors that have contributed to the spike in asylum denials, as my colleague George Fishman recently explained at length, but those two are almost definitely the key ones.

“The Number of Non-Criminal Detainees Arrested by ICE Has Surged by 2,000% under Trump”

Keep that nearly half-million final order figure for FY 2025 in mind when you consider headlines like the following, from CBS News on November 26: “The number of non-criminal detainees arrested by ICE has surged by 2,000% under Trump”.

It’s not just CBS, either. Washington Post, November 30: “DHS swept Chicago to get ‘the worst’ criminals. Many have no record”; CATO Institute, November 24: “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions”; NPR, November 17: “DOJ records show hundreds of immigrants arrested in Chicago had no criminal records”; The Guardian (UK), September 26: “Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention”.

Take all that with a grain of salt, because as I recently explained, nearly 60 percent of the aliens arrested by ICE in the interior and currently detained by the agency have either a criminal arrest or conviction, but even that statistic ignores a larger and more important point.

That point will be difficult for some to follow, because it involves — get this — the actual law, not the law as you or I would like it to be or even the world as would suit our own tastes and inclinations.

Section 241(a)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. § 1231(a)(2)(A) for those out there who think it’s just some stupid immigration rule) requires DHS to take custody of every alien under a final order of removal and to detain them for 90 days or until they are deported, whichever comes first.

That law doesn’t just apply to criminal aliens, or just aliens with “violent convictions” (whatever that means) — it applies to all aliens under final orders of removal, although to be fair the continued detention aspect of that rule is especially strict for aliens removable on criminal grounds.

Regardless, section 241(a)(2)(A) mandates that DHS at least as an initial matter take all aliens under final removal orders into custody.

You may not be familiar with that mandate because for decades it was ignored, but that all changed in January when Congress passed S. 5, the ”Laken Riley Act”, by broad and bipartisan margins.

Section 3(e) of that act amended section 241(a)(2) to empower state attorneys general to sue DHS for its failure to detain aliens under final orders of removal if such failure “harms such State or its residents” — likely one of the broadest standing grants you’ll see in any statute.

On the daily, some reporter or another asks — consistent with the articles above — why ICE is arresting and detaining “non-criminals” when “border czar” Tom Homan promised a “worst first” deportation plan last November.

The simplest answer is that the law changed since Homan made that vow and that the number of aliens under final removal orders who he must now arrest and detain has increased significantly in the last fiscal year alone.

When Homan started his latest gig, ICE had a non-detained docket of 1.44 million aliens under final orders of removal. That included about 87,000 aliens who were ordered removed under the last few months of Biden, but in the last nine months of FY 2025 alone, 400,000 new orders were added.

Again, most are likely non-criminals, but as noted, the law doesn’t care.

And the law doesn’t care for a good reason. Removal proceedings are little more than kabuki theater, “due process” is just a one-way street, and the INA is meaningless when aliens who receive their “due process” rights and are ordered removed but remain here anyway. Trump, Homan, and ICE are changing that trend — not that they have much choice thanks to the Laken Riley Act.

Why is ICE arresting so many alleged “non-criminal” aliens? Because the law now requires it to detain all aliens under final orders of removal — criminals and not — and immigration judges are issuing final orders of removal at a historical pace. Expect all of that to continue.