The Trump Administration plans to send some asylum cases directly to immigration courts instead of processing them through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services interviews.
In Georgia, attorneys warn fewer people will get asylum. Georgia’s immigration courts have some of the lowest asylum grant rates in the country. Data from the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse shows courts in Georgia for fiscal year 2025 had about an 87% asylum denial rate.
“Instead of resolving asylum backlogs, this change will simply haul the backlog from one system to another, creating more administrative burden that we’ll pay for with our tax dollars,” said Adriana Heffley, legal director at the nonprofit Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network. GAIN tracks immigration court outcomes in Georgia.
Heffley said there are two ways to win asylum in the U.S. One is the affirmative pathway, where a person fearing persecution due to things like race, religion or political opinion applies for asylum and interviews with a trauma-informed officer in USCIS.
The other is considered a defensive pathway, where a person is in deportation proceedings and must argue in front of an immigration judge and against a government prosecutor that they have a claim to asylum.
