Joe Biden spent four years turning the immigration court system into a revolving door for illegal aliens.
The backlog exploded, asylum approvals hit 50 percent, and removal orders were routinely ignored by everyone involved.
Now the numbers are in, and what Trump’s team just pulled off in a single month has the open-borders crowd scrambling for answers.
79,000 Orders in One Month — and the System Is Just Getting Started
President Donald Trump’s deputies have tripled the monthly number of judicial deportation orders, enabling officials to exceed their recent deportation records during the next few months.
The Justice Department’s immigration-court judges ordered the removal of 79,000 migrants in June, up from roughly 25,000 in December 2024 when President Joe Biden’s deputies were pulling migrants across US legal barriers.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a complete overhaul of how the system operates.
Andrew Arthur, a former immigration-court judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies, put it plainly: “They are plowing through these cases like a freaking snowplow in Utah snow. They’ve dropped the backlog from nearly 4 million down to less than 3.5 million.”
Migrants with deportation orders can be quickly arrested and deported because they have few legal options to stay in the United States. Under prior administrations, the deportation orders were routinely ignored by both migrants and deportation agencies, Arthur told Breitbart News.
That last detail deserves more attention than it usually gets. For years, a deportation order was basically a suggestion. The Biden administration treated it that way. ICE treated it that way. The illegal aliens themselves knew it, and their attorneys built entire delay strategies around it. The order would sit in a file while the clock ran out and the migrant disappeared into the interior.
The June data was shared by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which is sympathetic to migration and migrants. The site noted that the administration’s courts have a backlog of 3.2 million migrants after Biden’s migration boom.
The deportation orders were likely higher in July, and will likely be even higher in August, paving the way for even more deportations in early 2027. Just 1.9 percent of the court cases provide migrants with some legal status, down from roughly 25 percent in Biden’s term.
Asylum Grants Collapsed, and the Left’s Clock-Running Strategy Got Called Out
Trump’s judges in the asylum courts approved asylum for just 5.5 percent of migrants in June 2026, down from a high of 50 percent under Biden.
Fifty percent. Think about that number for a second. Under Biden, half of everyone who showed up to an asylum hearing walked out with some form of legal protection. The system wasn’t adjudicating claims. It was processing approvals.
The details of TRAC’s June data show that officials are dramatically stepping up removal orders for migrants in amnesty-zone states, including Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, but modestly reduced arrests in California and Washington state.
The deportation orders tripled for Romanians, and doubled for Haitians, Turks, Georgians, and Chileans, according to the data. Deportation orders for Chinese rose by 51 percent, but barely moved for Indians, despite the massive population of illegal migrants from India.
And the left-wing legal machine is not sitting still. DHS General Counsel James Percival has been unusually candid about what the opposition is actually trying to do here.
“What the left is really doing is they’re not trying to bring good cases and win them. They view the Trump administration as a four year hour glass, and they see the sand falling, and they know if they can just get enough crazy district judges to do enough crazy things, they can run out the clock. That’s the strategy,” he said.
That’s a senior government lawyer describing a coordinated legal delay campaign — not a series of good-faith constitutional objections, but a deliberate attempt to exhaust the clock before the administration can finish what voters sent it to Washington to do.
The 79,000 removals recorded in June came after Trump revamped the deportation process, cleared away many Biden barriers, appointed many new judges, and overcame many legal obstacles and delays created by investor-backed pro-migration lobby groups, lawyers, and judges.
Real Americans Are Already Seeing the Difference
The administration’s closure of Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians is forcing US employers to sacrifice profits by hiring more sidelined Americans and paying them higher wages.
That’s the part the mainstream press buries in paragraph fourteen. When illegal aliens and TPS recipients leave the labor market, American workers get hired. Wages go up. Employers who spent years suppressing compensation by importing cheap foreign labor suddenly have to compete for workers the way a free market is supposed to work.
On July 28, the Boston Globe reported that the exit of migrant workers is forcing elder-care companies to hire Americans: Hebrew SeniorLife has been preparing for this moment for months, said CEO Adam Scott, and has managed to hire enough workers to fill 75 percent of the positions the Haitian workers are leaving behind.
That’s one company in one industry in one city. Multiply it across every sector that spent the Biden years padding margins with cheap foreign labor and the scale of the economic correction becomes clear.
But the left-wing legal machine keeps grinding. Activist judges appointed by Democrat presidents keep issuing orders designed not to vindicate legal principles but to burn time. Percival has started publicly naming the worst offenders, which is unusual for a government lawyer and probably exactly the right move given the circumstances.
The administration’s opponents understand something important: if enough delay accumulates, the window closes. That’s why the number of pro-migration lawsuits has ballooned even as the legal arguments behind them keep losing on appeal. Volume is the strategy, not merit.
What the June numbers prove is that the administration is moving fast enough to stay ahead of the obstruction. The courts are processing cases. The orders are being issued. And unlike the Biden years, those orders are actually being enforced.
The backlog is still enormous. The administration’s courts have a backlog of 3.2 million migrants after Biden’s migration boom. That’s years of work remaining even at the current pace. But the pace is real, it’s documented, and it’s accelerating.
For years, enforcement critics claimed the immigration court system was simply too broken to produce results at scale. The June numbers put that argument to rest. The system wasn’t broken. It was deliberately managed to produce failure. Change the management, and the results change too.
And the voters who sent Donald Trump back to Washington knew exactly what they were asking for.
Sources: Breitbart News, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Center for Immigration Studies, Boston Globe (via Breitbart), Department of Homeland Security