How US Asylum Decisions Split Between Grants and Denials
Pooling every US immigration court's asylum merits decisions from FY2015 to FY2025 - a total of 725,732 cases decided on the merits, the national asylum grant rate is 48.2%: 349,592 grants against 376,140 denials. That single national figure hides wide variation: across the 77 courts that decided asylum cases, the grant rate ranges from 2.2% at Ulster Immigration Court up to 74.9% at New York - Federal Plaza Immigration Court.
Not legal advice. These are historical statistical aggregates from DOJ EOIR data, not a prediction for any individual case. Outcomes depend on facts specific to each case: consult a licensed immigration attorney or accredited representative for guidance on your situation.
The national grant / denial split
| Outcome | Cases | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Asylum granted | 349,592 | 48.2% |
| Asylum denied | 376,140 | 51.8% |
These are asylum (I-589) cases decided on the merits, granted or denied. Cases administratively closed, transferred, or still pending are not merits decisions and are not counted here.
How grant rates spread across courts
Grouping the 77 courts by their grant rate shows where the bulk of decisions are made. The largest group is the 40% – 59% band, holding 30 courts.
| Grant-rate band | Courts | Asylum decisions |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20% | 10 | 30,205 |
| 20% – 39% | 29 | 224,268 |
| 40% – 59% | 30 | 306,181 |
| 60% – 79% | 8 | 165,078 |
| 80% or higher | 0 | 0 |
Reading the distribution
The national rate is a case-weighted average, total grants divided by total merits decisions, not an average of the per-court rates, which would over-weight small courts. Because the courts cluster in the middle bands rather than at the extremes, the national figure sits close to the typical court, but individual courts on either tail decide a meaningful share of cases at much higher or much lower rates. The court-by-court and judge-by-judge pages on this site show the variance that a single national number smooths over.
These figures are descriptive summaries of past decisions, not predictions. A court's pooled grant rate reflects the mix of nationalities filing there, the share of represented applicants, the proportion of detained cases, and the individual judges assigned, it is not a measure of any one case's odds. A case denied at the immigration-court level may still be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
According to the DOJ Executive Office for Immigration Review's FOIA case-data release, 725,732 asylum merits decisions were recorded across all US immigration courts in its most recent published extract (accessed 2026-07-28). See our methodology for how the national and court-level grant rates are each computed from the underlying EOIR records.
Source: DOJ Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) - FOIA Case Data Asylum (I-589) merits decisions by court, FY2015–2025 · 2026