❓WHAT HAPPENED: Immigration judges issued nearly 500,000 removal orders in FY 2025, a significant increase from the previous year.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: Immigration judges, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
📍WHEN & WHERE: Fiscal Year 2025, across immigration courts in the United States.
🎯IMPACT: The increase in removal orders has led to a surge in ICE arrests, including many non-criminal detainees, due to new legal requirements.
U.S. immigration judges have issued nearly half a million removal orders in the 2025 fiscal year, according to updated statistics released by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Notably, this figure marks around a 57 percent increase from FY 2024, largely driven by over 306,500 in absentia orders where respondents failed to appear in court. Additionally, the data reveals 82,263 asylum claims were denied—more than double the prior fiscal year under the former Biden government.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) notes that one of the primary drivers of the increase is the Trump administration’s reversal of a Biden-era policy that allowed for the “terminating or dismissing [of] cases involving respondents who were removable but weren’t eligible for ‘relief’ from removal (like asylum).” According to CIS, this “quiet amnesty” program resulted in the termination of cases against an estimated 700,000 illegal immigrants who, under normal circumstances, would likely have faced removal.
Additionally, the EOIR data reveals a significant decline in asylum-only and withholding-only cases, totaling just 2,950. These are cases where a foreign national, previously deported, has reentered the United States and made a request for protection. In FY 2024, these cases totaled 4,308. CIS believes that the 32-percent decline in cases is mostly attributable to previously deported migrants no longer opting to attempt reentry, given the Trump administration’s strict crackdown on illegal immigration.
The data also shows the number of “non-criminal” detainees arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has surged by 2,000 percent compared to the final year of the Biden government. This is likely due in part to ICE allowing its agents to detain other illegal immigrants found during arrest actions against known criminals, resulting in those without criminal records also being taken into custody, but also due to ICE now enforcing removal orders against migrants without criminal records, where they were previously ignored.
Interestingly, per CIS, when the Trump administration implemented its deportation policies, “ICE had a non-detained docket of 1.44 million aliens under final orders of removal. That included about 87,000 aliens who were ordered removed under the last few months of Biden, but in the last nine months of FY 2025 alone, 400,000 new orders were added.”
Notably, a number of the legal changes that have increased deportation orders—including for non-criminal illegal immigrants—are due in large part to the Laken Riley Act.
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