When U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joe Edlow returned for another stint in the Trump administration, he expected to wrangle with a mess left by the Biden administration’s border crisis.
Soon, however, Edlow would be met with a surprise. Not only was USCIS forced to tackle a record-setting pile of asylum cases, but he was tasked with leading an agency that, for 4 years, did very little to address immigration fraud. The director has since buckled down on asylum fraud, identifying discrepancies in immigration programs and tightening election integrity.
“What I didn’t know was what some of our backlogs turned into,” Edlow said to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Nominated by President Donald Trump in March and officially sworn into the position in July, Edlow took the reins of an agency put to the brink amid following 8.5 million migrant encounters along the southern border during the Biden era. Although largely unfazed by what he uncovered, the immigration chief says he was still taken aback by his predecessors’ sheer apathy for weeding out fraud. (RELATED: Mexico Hands Over Notorious Cartel Leaders To Trump Admin)
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Deputy Director for Policy Joseph Edlow,(R) and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, applaud and congratulate new US citizens during a naturalization ceremony hosted by the USCIS at the State Department in Washington, DC, on October 22, 2020. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta / POOL / AFP) (Photo by MANUEL BALCE CENETA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Prior to leading the agency, Edlow had served as chief counsel and deputy director of USCIS during President Donald Trump’s first term in office. In July, he returned to a backlog of asylum cases that dwarfed the numbers he previously dealt with.
“We had about 450,000 cases that were pending on the asylum active docket,” Edlow said of the end of Trump’s first term. “When I got back, there were over 1.5 million cases.”
“Does anything surprise on me what they were doing? Yeah, what surprised me is they weren’t doing much,” he continued. “We already knew that there was a misalignment of priorities and resources, but that became painfully obvious that really USCIS was acting as kind of the the arm of the administration to help maneuver the parole programs, to do what they could on credible fear and to ultimately try to address the growing border crisis that the Bidens have created.”
Americans are painfully aware of the illegal immigration crisis that raged during most of President Joe Biden’s tenure.
Fiscal years 2023 and 2024 were the worst and second worst years, respectively, for inadmissible border encounters in history, according to Customs and Border Protection data, leading to an incredible strain of resources at border communities and major U.S. cities. Altogether, the Biden administration oversaw more than eight million migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during its four fiscal years in office.
Record-level immigration into the U.S. inevitably correlated to a monumental uptick in asylum claims, which are largely processed by USCIS.
There were roughly 311,000 pending affirmative asylum claims in January 2018, according to a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report. By the end of fiscal year 2022 — well into Biden’s tenure — this number nearly doubled to 625,000. By 2024, the backlog of affirmative asylum cases surpassed one million for the first time in history.
Affirmative asylum claims are distinct from defensive asylum claims in that they are lodged by foreign nationals already in the U.S. and not in deportation proceedings, according to USCIS. Defensive asylum claims are made by those already undergoing removal.
As illegal immigration skyrocketed, leaving federal immigration agents and local officials scrambling to keep up, the Biden administration implemented a slate of programs that GOP critics characterized as amnesty run-arounds to alleviate the terrible optics taking place at the Mexico border.
Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General analysis of USCIS’ pending affirmative asylum claims
The Biden White House launched the CHNV program, allowing more than half a million Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals to enter the U.S. Biden officials also revamped the CBP One app allowing foreign nationals to easily apply for asylum en masse, and extended deportation protections for a slate of countries, allowing their citizens to remain in the U.S.
Government officials that held the line against immigration fraud were largely given the boot, according to their accounts. A slate of Trump-appointed immigration judges were booted by the Biden administration, prompting GOP investigation at the time.
“I was punished by the Biden Administration for calling out fraudulent asylum claims while I was an Immigration Judge,” Matt O’Brien — who served as a judge during both the Trump and Biden administrations — said to the DCNF. O’Brien was fired by the Biden White House after establishing a tough record on asylum applicants.
Of the 288 asylum cases he decided, O’Brien granted asylum for 25, granted eight other types of relief and denied relief for 255, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data. This equated to a denial rate of 88.5%, well above the 57.7% average for all immigration court judges at the time, and a denial rate that earned him the disdain of open-border immigration activists.
“And that happened because open borders radicals love immigration fraud. They have treated it as a feature of the system, not a bug,” O’Brien said. “That’s why we currently have hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who have never experienced persecution getting asylum.”
O’Brien, who now serves as the deputy executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, was among several Trump-appointed immigration judges given the boot during the Biden administration, prompting an investigation by congressional Republicans at the time.
Edlow, not at the helm of the country’s legal immigration system, believes there was a “get-to-yes mentality” among USCIS during the Biden era, paving the way for fraudulent claims to get through.
In contrast, the Trump administration has gone to great lengths to shore up its fraud enforcement apparatus.
In just the past few months, USCIS has implanted new measures to better prevent foreign nationals from voting in U.S. elections and has illustrated how Special Immigrant Juvenile program was rife with adult gangbangers, sexual predators and even alleged murders. However, the USCIS chief says they’ve only just begun cracking down.
“We’ve got to return the integrity of the immigration system, and that’s really a job for USCIS,” Edlow said to the DCNF.
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