This week, the Department of Homeland Security announced a new effort to crack down on asylum fraud — by going after the lawyers who enable it.
DHS will be imposing civil fines on attorneys who file bogus and frivolous protection applications on behalf of their alien clients.
About time: For decades, various administrations have turned a blind eye to those who exploit Americans’ humanitarian instincts for pecuniary gain.
By its nature, fraud generally is one of the hardest crimes to prove — it’s axiomatic in law enforcement that the greatest con artists are the ones who never got caught.
Our generous asylum laws, however, almost encourage fraud.
To ensure immigrants aren’t returned to persecution or torture back home, the US asylum statute is intentionally lax on the evidence applicants must present to support their claims.
Applicants’ testimony alone “may be sufficient to sustain” their burden of proof “without corroboration,” but only if the court finds it credible and concludes there’s no supporting evidence they could and must present.
That overly compassionate evidence standard has been abused for years by aliens who concoct tales of mistreatment and harm, many of which boggle the imagination and strain credulity.
But given that few judges are familiar with police practices in far-off lands, or with the political struggles in remote regions of the world, they don’t have much to go on.
The State Department used to help.
Prior to President Barack Obama’s administration, consular officers would pore over applications, opining on some directly and writing generalized “country conditions” assessments on the most common claims in the rest.
Back then, asylum applications were far more limited, with a backlog of about 106,000 in 2012.
It’s been over a decade since the State Department provided such comments, and in the interim, the backlog — nearly 2.36 million asylum applications in the nation’s 73 immigration courts alone — has grown so large our consular officers abroad would be powerless to respond to more than a sample.
The flood of cases, coupled with the relaxed evidentiary standards and the promise of a work permit for simply filing an application, has created a vulnerability that unauthorized aliens and more than a few attorneys and notarios — hucksters who pass themselves off as lawyers with no license or training — have exploited.
Want proof?
In the first six months of FY 2026 alone, more than 48,000 aliens who had already filed applications were ordered removed in absentia when they simply stopped going to immigration court.
The only reason an immigrant would file an application and not appear thereafter is because the claims therein were worthless.
But going through the motions of making them was precondition to obtaining a work permit — and a Social Security number, which remains valid even after the employment document isn’t.
Critically, and although DHS doesn’t spell it out, the department is not only going after “fraudulent applications” — in which one or more of the claims is false or fabricated — but “frivolous” ones, as well.
A frivolous application is one in which the claims may be true, but they fail to satisfy the strenuous statutory requirements for asylum.
To be granted asylum, an alien must show past persecution or a “well-founded fear of persecution” on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
Poverty, common crime and even violent conflict aren’t sufficient — but I have heard of claims from immigrants who argued the police back home give out too many parking tickets, the neighbors look at them funny, or the smog in their hometown causes asthma.
Asylum applicants themselves might not know those claims are woefully insufficient, but licensed attorneys either do or should.
With DHS consequences now in play, expect them to check the law and the facts before hitting send on an iffy application — or not send it at all.
Reviewing nearly 3 million applications will be challenging, but many judges and attorneys — the vast majority of whom are scrupulous and diligent — are fed up with shady practitioners and ready to drop a dime.
And an assist from artificial intelligence will enable DHS to scan through hundreds of files at a time, looking for repeated phrases and scenarios, common markers of fraud in past investigations.
It’s well past time to end the fraud and the frivolity undermining our immigration system.
Andrew Arthur is a fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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