America’s immigration debate often focuses on the need for a physical border wall, the elimination of illegal border crossings, or the need for mass deportations, specifically from so-called “sanctuary” cities.
These are indeed important policy priorities. But there is a deeper, more systemic crisis: a “legal” immigration machine that has been weaponized to accomplish the same goals as mass illegal immigration through a nominally state-sanctioned process.
This machine is the U.S. asylum system – and President Trump’s efforts to curtail its rampant abuse may be his most important immigration achievement that no one is talking about.
The asylum system was originally designed as a narrow safeguard for those fleeing specific, state-sponsored persecution. It was born out of Americans’ good-hearted generosity and compassion for those truly facing physical harm or even death for what they believe. But over the course of the last few decades, liberal politicians, bureaucrats, and judges have systematically transformed it into a broad-spectrum “catch-all” to implement a left-wing mass migration agenda.
It is here, within exploited immigration programs such as America’s asylum process, that U.S. sovereignty is most effectively subverted and eroded from within. But Trump has systematically closed the administrative loopholes in the asylum process that have long fueled America’s immigration crisis – transforming a broken system of foreign resettlement into an engine of immigration enforcement.
The administrative erosion of the past decade was facilitated by a bench of immigration judges who had largely abandoned the strict legal standards of the 1980 Refugee Act.
By exploiting the “credible fear” script to bypass traditional visa protocols, millions of migrants were able to treat America’s national borders as optional, and immigration judges who are better described as open-borders activists were all too happy to facilitate this subversion.
During the Biden administration, as well as during the eight years under President Obama, many judges granted asylum at rates approaching 50 percent, often by unilaterally expanding the definition of “persecution” to include generalized poverty, hardship, or domestic unrest – categories Congress never intended the asylum program to cover.
However, according to data analyzed by the Cato Institute, under the current Trump administration, the “legal” entry of asylum seekers at southwest ports of entry fell by a staggering 99.9 percent between December 2024 and February 2025 – dropping from nearly 40,000 monthly entries to a mere 26. Additionally, the number of refugees admitted into the United States also declined by nearly 90 percent.
These remarkable results were achieved primarily with two common sense changes to the U.S. immigration process.
The first was the Trump administration’s overhaul of the CBP One app. Under the Biden administration, the app functioned as a de facto digital concierge service for mass amounts of unvetted arrivals. Immediately after taking office, the Trump administration turned it into a platform for illegals to self-deport.
Even more importantly, the Trump administration has also dismissed more than 100 activist judges while appointing 143 new jurists, many of whom have backgrounds as former DHS prosecutors or military lawyers.
By replacing immigration bureaucrats who viewed themselves as global social workers with judges aligned with the Trump administration’s goal of deportations, integrity, and the rule of law, the administration has helped restore the asylum system to its original purpose.
For years, the decoupling of immigration law from the national interest allowed the administrative state to essentially subsidize the exploitation of our own borders, turning America into an immigration turnstile that only allowed people in while preventing their departures.
Unsurprisingly, when the administrative state stops facilitating mass immigration, the flood of fraudulent claims miraculously evaporates, leading to an incredible 2.2 million self-deportations since January 2025.
Because work authorization was historically granted while claims languished in years-long delays, the “prize” for a meritless asylum claim was often several years of “legal” status and access to the American labor market. A New York Times investigation highlighted how this broken “revolving door” effectively transformed America’s asylum program into a low-skill labor pipeline.
To kill this financial incentive, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a landmark rule in February 2026 to extend the wait for work permits from 150 days to a full 365 days. This policy change is designed to ensure that aliens are not entitled to work while their claims are processed, thereby stripping the economic incentive to commit fraud.
Coupled with a shift toward mandatory detention – a policy the Trump administration fought for in the federal courts – migrants can no longer expect an immediate paycheck; instead, they get the full weight of the law. As the administration told the Times, the goal is to prioritize those actually seeking refuge from danger rather than those seeking to skip the line to get into the United States.
Beyond the courtroom and the bench, the administration has also utilized its executive authority to enact a historic contraction of the legal immigration flow from high-risk regions.
The Cato Institute reports that, as of January 2026, immigrant visas for legal permanent residents fell by about half, thanks in part to the ban on immigrant visas for citizens of 40 countries, including the Palestinian Territories – affecting about one-fifth of global applicants. By January 21, 2026, this ban extended to 92 countries to meet new national security vetting standards.
This strategy represents a fundamental shift away from the “diversity makes America stronger” model of the previous decades.
The State Department’s suspension of the Diversity Visa Lottery in late 2025 further underscores this pivot toward a merit and security-based system. Of course, critics at the pro-mass migration Cato Institute argue that these bans represent a “broad assault” on legal immigration (as if that is, by default, a bad thing). But for those concerned with U.S. sovereignty, it is a long-overdue recalibration.
By cutting immigrant visas by approximately 43 percent from 2024 levels, the Trump administration is ensuring that legal entry is once again a selective process that prioritizes the safety and economic stability of the American citizen.
All told, these moves by the Trump administration have led to net-negative migration for the first time in 50 years across every American metro area, while America’s immigration case backlog fell in 2025 for the first time in at least 17 years.
For decades, this immigration “backlog” was strategically weaponized by open-border advocates to justify mass parole and de facto amnesty. By allowing immigration cases to pile up to nearly four million, previous administrations ensured that “deportation” became a mathematical impossibility.
However, research from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows that the administration has finally turned the tide of this bureaucratic inertia. For the first nine months of fiscal 2025, 588,000 pending cases were completed, while just over 448,000 new ones were received. This stands in stark contrast to 2024, when there were 1.08 million more cases opened than closed.
President Biden told Americans in 2024 that a “bipartisan” immigration bill (read: mass amnesty) was required for his administration to get America’s immigration crisis under control. The Trump administration has proven this assessment to be not only false, but a deliberate lie.
By using the power of the Executive Branch, President Trump has closed the asylum loopholes, purged the activist bench, and stripped the economic incentives from those who would game our system.
Americans finally have a president determined to uphold the fundamental principle that America belongs to the American people, not to millions who seek to bypass our laws with the assistance of an activist immigration bureaucracy.
America’s “revolving door” is finally being locked, and for the first time in decades, the American interior is being guarded by the integrity of the law for the benefit of American citizens, rather than foreign fraudsters and intruders.
Adam Johnston is a senior contributor to The Federalist whose work has been featured in The Blaze and the Daily Caller. He is also the creator of the Substack publication “Conquest Theory” where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @adamkjohnston.
