As the United States awaits a final decision on the fate of Title 42, the backlog of asylum claims by illegal aliens attempting to enter the country has surpassed 1.5 million.
The New York Post reports that the exact total of 1,565,966 is split evenly between two categories of asylum seekers: Those currently awaiting hearings before judges in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Immigration Courts system (767,882), and those who are awaiting hearings in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) court system (778,084), which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
These numbers were produced through an analysis by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which claims that the leading cause of the surge in asylum-seekers is political instability in their home countries, particularly Mexico, Haiti, and Venezuela, among other countries in Latin America.
Overall, the total number of asylum applications in the U.S. has increased seven-fold within the last ten years, with over 750,000 cases in 2022, compared to just 100,000 in 2012.
Syracuse’s TRAC study warned that the numbers will only increase even more if Title 42 is ultimately ended by the Biden Administration. The Trump-era policy was implemented at the start of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, citing public health as a reason for greatly reducing the levels of both legal and illegal immigration into the United States. The policy proved a great success and reduced immigration levels to near zero in 2020, but upon taking power, Joe Biden has vowed to end the policy in order to continue his open-borders approach to immigration.
Just as the federal policy was set to end, the Supreme Court issued an order halting the action, allowing it to temporarily remain in place while a coalition of Republican-led states make their case in February for the policy’s preservation.