The U.S. Justice Department has directed federal immigration judges to scour their dockets for asylum cases they can deny without holding a full hearing, signaling that the Trump administration is taking aim at severe court backlogs as it seeks to ramp up deportations.

Judges should take “all appropriate action to immediately resolve cases on their dockets that do not have viable legal paths for relief or protection from removal,” Sirce Owen, acting director of the Justice Department office that oversees the immigration courts, said in an April 11 memo that took effect the same day. The directive was reported earlier by The New York Times.

Speeding up the flow of cases through immigration court could bolster the administration’s effort to expand its mass arrest and deportation effort, which President Donald Trump has vowed to make the biggest in U.S. history. Deportation orders are issued for asylum-seekers whose cases are denied, with or without a hearing. Immigration judges are Justice Department employees, not members of the independent judiciary.

As many as half of the pending cases in the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review are believed to be from asylum-seekers, although the exact number is unclear.

Trump complained about the backlog in a Wednesday posting on Truth Social after a federal district judge blocked him earlier this week from revoking humanitarian protections for about 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who arrived during the Biden administration.

The Trump administration also is trying to rapidly expand its detention capacity, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement offering contracts valued at as much as $45 billion for new immigration jails. And in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele plans to double the capacity of the prison where his government is holding U.S. deportees, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Expanding docket

Cases in immigration court can take years to complete, and reducing the backlog has been a focus of successive administrations from both parties. Former President Barack Obama tried to address the issue by closing thousands of cases.

Since then, the docket has soared as millions of migrants from around the world flocked to the U.S. border with Mexico. Most crossed into the U.S. illegally, surrendered to waiting Border Patrol agents and told authorities they planned to seek asylum.

Winning asylum is a long-shot bid for most migrants. During the 2024 budget year, when a record number of cases were finished, about 12% were approved while roughly 14% were denied. The remaining cases were either abandoned, terminated without a decision or administratively closed.

The latest plan to deny cases without a hearing mirrors a policy enacted during the first Trump administration, though its impacts at the time were limited and the order was reversed by the Biden administration, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Reichlin-Melnick said migrants whose cases are denied could still appeal at the Justice Department, a process that could ultimately slow down any efforts to swiftly deny and deport them. Earlier this month, the Justice Department said it was reducing the size of the appeals board from 28 to 15 members, a move that immigration lawyers have said could also further slow the system.

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