What Trump’s asylum ‘pause’ means – and what it doesn’t

The pause does not impact most asylum cases.

While the White House has said the Trump administration is “pausing all asylum decisions”, current directives impact fewer than half of outstanding claims.

Asylum is a legal status given to foreign nationals who face significant fear of persecution if they return home. For those who arrive in the United States with legal authorization – on a valid visa, for example – that process begins with an application to US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Others start their cases after an arrest or interview with immigration enforcement officers, and have to press their cases before a judge.

Trump’s pause applies to the roughly 1.5m cases currently standing before USCIS. But they do not appear to apply to immigration courts, where some 2.4m asylum cases remain pending. Neither DHS nor the executive office for immigration review responded to the Guardian’s requests for clarification.

The pause marks a reversal for Trump.

Before the pause, the Trump administration had taken the opposite approach on asylum, clearing cases at a blistering pace.

According to USCIS’s most recent quarterly report, the number of asylum cases completed jumped to 135,091 – nearly five times the number cleared over the same period last year, back when Joe Biden was president. The number of asylum denials rose six fold over the same period, to 6,850. And under Trump, the backlog of pending cases began to shrink modestly, after nearly quadrupling to 1.5m cases since 2021.

The pause will likely mean less than what comes after it.

The Trump administration will likely struggle to keep USCIS from moving forward on asylum claims forever – not least because such obstruction would invite legal challenge. The administration already faces ongoing federal litigation over most of its efforts to remake the immigration system.

“I imagine if the asylum pause lasts more than a couple of weeks that there will be a lawsuit filed,” said Julia Gelatt, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Almost every move is litigated and this is a pretty sweeping move.”

But the pause might not be the point, Gelatt said.

“There might be a pause because they want to revisit procedures,” Gelatt said. “Or maybe there’s a pause because they’re exploring other police options … Right now there have been a lot of press releases and broad statements, but not concrete policy updates. We might see those in the coming days or weeks.”