What role did court backlogs, asylum policy, and Title 42/other public health measures play in annual removal figures?
Executive summary
Court backlogs, shifting asylum adjudication rules, and pandemic-era public-health practices together reshaped annual removal figures by delaying decisions, rechanneling claims between agencies, and temporarily limiting removals — but the precise contribution of Title 42 specifically is not documented in the materials provided. The immigration-court backlog grew to millions of pending cases and prolonged both the removal of people without valid claims and the protection of those eligible for asylum [1] [2] [3], while policy moves such as the 2022 interim rule and prosecutorial-discretion memoranda shifted large swaths of cases between EOIR and USCIS and altered case counts without resolving underlying caseload pressure [4] [5] [6].
1. Court backlogs: a bottleneck that suppresses and defers removals
The immigration courts’ massive backlog — reported in multiple sources as numbering in the hundreds of thousands to millions of pending cases — slowed adjudication and therefore both delayed removals and delayed grant-of-protection determinations for asylum seekers, meaning annual removal totals understate the number of people whose status was unresolved at any given year [1] [2] [3] [7]. GAO and related reporting emphasize that multi-year waits allow some noncitizens to remain physically in the United States for years while their cases languish, and those same delays mean fewer completed removal proceedings per year than would occur in a fully staffed system [2] [8]. The geographic concentration of backlog — with courts like Miami and New York carrying particularly heavy loads — also skews annual outputs regionally [7].
2. Asylum-policy changes: moving cases rather than eliminating demand
Policy interventions beginning in 2022 — including an interim final rule shifting initial credible-fear and some defensive-asylum work to USCIS asylum officers and administrative exercises of prosecutorial discretion such as the Doyle memorandum — changed where cases are processed and how they are counted, producing downward pressure on immigration-court inventories while increasing USCIS affirmative backlogs and altering the flow of removals [4] [5] [6]. Advocates and analysts note that transferring workloads to USCIS was intended to shorten adjudication times and reduce court backlogs, but that USCIS’s own affirmative asylum backlog ballooned and required supplemental funding, so the net effect on annual removal figures was a redistribution of pending cases between agencies rather than an immediate surge in removals [5] [6] [8].
3. Pandemic and public-health measures: closures, fewer completions, and procedural shifts
COVID-related court closures, virtual-hearing disruptions, and resource diversions during the pandemic materially reduced the number of completed immigration-court cases and therefore lowered annual removal completions for a period, while also exacerbating backlogs once hearings resumed [9] [2]. Human Rights First and others reported that pandemic precautions limited asylum interviews and diverted asylum-staff time to pandemic- and policy-driven tasks such as fear screenings tied to reimplemented border programs — factors that slowed adjudications and affected yearly statistics [10]. The provided sources document these broader public-health impacts, but they do not supply detailed, source-backed estimates isolating the effect of Title 42 specifically on annual removals, so claims about Title 42’s precise numerical impact cannot be confirmed from this reporting [10] [9].
4. Expedited removal, credible-fear processing and their amplification of annual volatility
Mechanisms like expedited removal and credible-fear procedures affect annual removal figures by accelerating some cases out of standard court dockets and by funneling others into different administrative tracks; the 2022 regulatory shifts to have USCIS conduct initial adjudications for many expedited-removal referrals were explicitly designed to “promptly remove” those not eligible while speeding protection for those who are, thereby changing how many removals are recorded by which agency in any fiscal year [4] [5]. Critics warn that prosecutorial discretion that cancels or administratively closes thousands of court matters — for example the Doyle-directed terminations reported in FY2022 — can produce sudden drops in court-count removals while leaving the underlying enforcement posture and eventual outcomes opaque [6].
5. Competing narratives and hidden incentives shaping interpretation
Different actors frame these dynamics to suit policy goals: advocacy groups stress harms to asylum seekers from delays and diverted resources [10] [8], while commentators such as the Center for Immigration Studies emphasize administrative decisions that reduced court counts and argue those moves obscure enforcement realities [6]. Agencies’ attempts to rebalance workloads — and Congress’s episodic funding injections — have political and operational incentives that affect public statistics: shifting cases between USCIS and EOIR can reduce visible court backlogs without reducing overall unresolved caseloads, which in turn changes annual removal tallies even if the underlying migratory flows have not materially shifted [5] [6] [8].