On Wednesday, officials with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced a change to the way they handle asylum claims, which will mean that more recent claims will be judged first. USCIS claims that this change will improve the system by increasing efficiency and deterring false claims.
Asylum seekers usually have to wait at least five years to have their cases heard, and there was a backlog at US Citizenship and Immigration Services of 311,000 pending cases on 21 January this year. The backlog was partly the result of an increase in recent years of the number of people claiming asylum at the southern border of the US, which began in 2012.
USCIS claims that, during the last five years, the backlog of asylum seekers cases has increased by as much as 1750 percent. The agency now intends to have interviews for more recent asylum applicants scheduled in front of older applicants. This is a return to the system used before December 2014, when the Obama administration made a decision to give older cases priority.
Officials with the Trump administration claim that the long waiting times encourage fraudulent claims and that by ensuring new claims are judged first, it will discourage applications from people whose claims are illegitimate but who are hoping to work legally in the US for several years because the backlog means processing their claims takes so long.