by Monica Showalter
The most infuriating thing about the border surge is not simply the breach of the unguarded border, but the string of lies that premised it -- the fake claims of asylum of the illegal migrants, claiming to be persecuted and terrified of returning to their home countries, which as anyone with a lick of sense could surmise had no merit whatsoever.
It was obvious enough in the absence of crises around the world, in the country-shopping of the migrants for the best benefit packages which real refugees seeking any port in a storm would never do, in the payments to cartels, and in the fact that most asylum seekers came from full-blown democracies where they had the right to vote their governments out if there was a problem.
But none of that speaks quite like the behavior of migrants, responding to incentives handed to them from the Joe Biden side of the equation, where everyone who broke into the country was allowed to apply for asylum and offered a full-ride benefit package, including transport, hotels, work permits, free education, free medical care, free food, free Obamaphones, and free housing. All, that, plus 'coaching' by federally funded legal service NGOs, including Catholic Charities, for illegals, on how to successfully game the system in order to win their phony asylum cases, as some did.
We can see how fake it all was now in the second year of the Trump administration: The illegal border crossers are now skipping their asylum hearings. Asylum hearing skippings went from 4,000 a month in 2025 to 8,000 a month this year, according to the Center of Immigration Studies, which found it fairly easy to find that data based on the numbers ordered removed in absentia.
The Center for Immigration Studies writes:
As that [asylum court] process continues and Biden’s border removal cases are nearing final adjudications, no-show asylum applicant removal orders are quickly increasing.
In FY 2025, immigration judges ordered more than 50,000 respondents who had filed I-589s but then failed to appear in court removed in absentia — one in six of all no-show orders issued last fiscal year (306,500-plus), and an average of nearly 4,200 orders per month.
That trend is only increasing. Through the end of March (the midway point of FY 2026), immigration judges issued in absentia removal orders to more than 48,000 respondents who had come to court in the past, filed asylum applications, but then ultimately failed to appear.
That’s an average of more than 8,000 no-show orders per month for respondents with pending I-589s, and lest you think this figure simply reflects the increase in the overall backlog, here are the facts: The total number of pending cases in immigration court has risen nearly 257 percent since FY 2019, but the monthly average of in absentia orders for aliens with pending asylum applications has ballooned by more than 900 percent over that same period — 3.5 times quicker than the overall backlog rate.
It also corresponds with a report last year that illegal immigrants self-deported at a record rate, preserving their right to reapply to come to the U.S. legally.
CIS continued:
Throughout the Biden administration, DHS and most in the media portrayed the illegal migrants pouring into this country as bedraggled innocents fleeing from persecution, war, famine, gripping poverty, and/or “climate change”, cast into a bewildering and complex legal system they needed government-paid lawyers to navigate.
Respectfully, those migrants’ ability to contract with criminal smuggling organizations and evade authorities on the journey to the United States should have called such characterizations into question from the beginning, but if you really want to understand how savvy many of those illegal entrants really were, just look at the EOIR stats.
Here’s the cold reality: Millions of aliens came illegally under Biden, were released by DHS under the ruse of being “asylum seekers”, and were placed into removal proceedings to seek protection; tens to hundreds of thousands of them realized they could get work permits if they simply applied for asylum; and now — in increasing numbers — they aren’t coming to court because they never wanted asylum — they wanted to work.
There is no reason for an alien with a legit claim to skip court, because an asylum grant unlocks countless government benefits, places the beneficiary on a path to a green card and citizenship, and allows aliens to bring their immediate family to the United States.
The fact that they aren’t showing up in court and abandoning their applications underscores what their real intentions were all along.
If the American people didn’t feel like suckers before, when they were paying billions per month to care for tens of thousands of so-called “asylum seekers” arriving monthly, they should now. We all got played by migrants who claimed to seek protection but really wanted work permits, and the worst part is that the Biden administration likely realized what was happening in real time — and simply didn’t care.
And that's what it's really about -- cheating the American voters into providing full rides for the world's persecuted when in fact they weren't persecuted at all/ They just wanted a full-ride whole-life foreign aid package including the promise of a U.S. passport and U.S. voting rights instead of living their lives in their home countries. We can also see the fakery exposed in the record numbers of self-deportations of the migrants, which was reported a couple weeks ago. If one is so scared of returning to one's home country, why would it be a good idea to go back to it in order to preserve one's right to apply to come to the U.S. legally?
It's all coming out in the wash -- and the press, the pols, and the NGOs which promoted this phony narrative about a global upsurge in persecution have a lot of explaining to do.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/05/fake_asylum_claims_go_poof_as_illegals_skip_their_asylum_hearings_in_droves.html
