For asylum seekers in the United States, the prospect of relief in immigration court is waning.
Since President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, his administration has moved to remake immigration courts across the country and accelerate deportations. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired nationwide, according to the New York Times, while data from courtrooms shows that asylum cases are increasingly being denied.
At Fort Snelling Immigration Court, Minnesota attorneys are seeing the change.
“They are looking to, it seems, dispense with these cases in as quick a manner as possible,” said Brian Aust, a local immigration attorney.
Compounding concerns is the appointment of a new immigration judge at Fort Snelling. Nathan Hansen, a Minnesota attorney who has promoted right-wing conspiracy theories, will begin hearing cases this month, according to an April 8 news release from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
As the Trump administration increasingly publicizes its intent to accelerate deportations through the immigration court system, some attorneys voice skepticism that their clients will receive due process.
“When a court system labels their adjudicators as deportation judges, the jig is up as far as any appearance of justice being the aim of the system in which we are operating,” Aust said.
Narrowing paths to asylum
Nationally, asylum grant rates have decreased dramatically since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Only 7% of asylum requests were granted in February 2026 nationwide, according to the New York Times, while the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) puts the number closer to 5%.
In Minnesota, attorneys say actions taken at Fort Snelling mirror those trends.
“We had two cases here in our office that I think in any other administration would have been easily granted as asylum claims,” Aust said. “These were very classic political opinion, people who had been members of perceived opposition groups within their countries of origin, and had endured a fair degree of persecution.”
Several local immigration attorneys who spoke with Sahan Journal said the government is increasingly filing motions to deny cases without a full hearing, an action known as pretermission.
Minneapolis attorney Paul Hultgren said ICE has filed motions to pretermit several of his clients’ cases, including that of a Venezuelan national who was ultimately given an order of removal to Ecuador.
“From my perspective, [it’s] just kind of a fast track to issue more deportation orders,” Hultgren said.
Several decisions last year from the Board of Immigration Appeals, an administrative body within the U.S. Department of Justice that interprets immigration laws, expanded the ability for immigration judges to pretermit cases. Cases can also be dismissed for incomplete or improperly filled out asylum applications, including incomplete individual answers.
Hultgren added that judges are taking more impetus to issue deportation orders themselves.
“Some judges will say, ‘I have concerns about your case; can you explain why I shouldn’t issue a deportation order?'” Hultgren said. “When judges take that step themselves, it ends up aligning with what ICE is seeking.”
New judges face ‘a very steep learning curve’
Earlier this month, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) announced Hansen’s appointment as a new immigration judge at Fort Snelling. Reporting by the Minnesota Reformer shows Hansen has an extensive history of promoting right-wing conspiracy theories and fringe legal theories.
In the news release, the EOIR did not mention Hansen having any immigration law experience, citing only his educational background and license to practice law in Minnesota. His biographical information was the shortest of all 32 judges announced in the news release.
Ryan Wood, a former assistant chief immigration judge in Minnesota who has trained hundreds of immigration judges, said relevant experience is crucial for new judges.
“We’re looking at either immigration experience, experience in the law, or an aptitude to learn it,” Wood said. “We have had strong great people that have no experience with immigration law, but they’re a former judge, or they have strong litigation skills and can quickly learn.
“If you don’t have that experience, it’s a very steep learning curve,” he added.
Nationwide, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired without explanation since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Last year, immigration judge Amy Zaske was fired from Fort Snelling, despite 16 years of experience as an assistant chief counsel with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Local immigration attorney Marc Prokosch said that despite tightening asylum grant rates, the influx of new judges to immigration courts could provide inadvertent avenues of relief for asylum seekers.
“The Justice Department is firing a lot of people and then putting in new, probably unqualified people, which then gives us lawyers ammunition for proper legal appeals,” Prokosch said.
Still, in the short term, respondents’ chances of receiving legal status through immigration courts have diminished. Prokosch said as long as pressure is coming from the government to deny cases, that won’t change.
“I think any employee will know what their bosses want, and will know when their jobs are at risk,” he said.
ICE in the courthouse
A judge’s order of removal has not been the only risk asylum seekers face at Fort Snelling since Trump took office.
For months, ICE agents waited in the hallways of the Whipple Federal Building, detaining hundreds of individuals who had their cases dismissed by an immigration judge. This practice was a stark departure from previous administrations, for which arrests at courthouses were off limits.
Central to the practice was a May 2025 memo that the government claimed gave ICE the authority to detain immigrants in courthouses nationwide. During a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), however, the Department of Justice admitted that ICE lied about their authority to conduct these courthouse arrests.
With this revelation, the NYCLU’s supervising attorney for the case, Amy Belsher, said parties are revisiting a previous preliminary decision made in the case that allowed arrests to continue.
According to Amy Lange, head of The Advocates for Human Rights’ court observation project, arrests at Fort Snelling largely diminished in January following intense public attention after high-profile violence during Operation Metro Surge. She warned that arrests could resume in the future and said observers witnessed one arrest in March.
Belsher said that if successful, the NYCLU’s suit would prevent arrests at immigration courts nationwide, including Fort Snelling. For those already detained — many of whom have already been deported or self-deported — relief may arrive too late, however.
“I think that this is just another example of how ICE plays fast and loose with people’s lives,” Belsher said. “They don’t really care, and they don’t face consequences.”
Taking stock of a broken system
Ryan Wood began as an immigration judge at Fort Snelling in 2017, following years of work in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. He became assistant chief immigration judge in 2019, and for years trained new immigration judges across the country. In January 2025, seeing the direction in which immigration courts were headed, he resigned.
Fifteen months removed from Trump’s inauguration, Wood’s concerns about the immigration court system have proven prescient. He said judges are now under immense pressure to accelerate removals, or risk their own positions.
“The agency has just put enormous pressure on the judges to do multiple hearings a day in very quick order,” he said. “So what used to be two or three merits hearings a day, they’re doing five, six, seven merits hearings a day, and if you don’t do that and don’t follow in line, then you may not be here by the end of the week.”
Wood also expressed concern about judges’ ability to make independent decisions. He pointed to requirements within the Department of Justice to report bond hearing decisions as another example of how the federal government exerts pressure.
“[Judges think] ‘If I grant this bond, I’ve got to report it all the way up to Washington, D.C., now,’” Wood said. “That becomes a factor in the bond decision. It’s not an explicit influence, but if I just deny it, I don’t have to do anything.”
The result, Wood said, is that immigration judges are pressured to deny as many cases as possible.
“You have Zaske, a good example of this, of someone who was not a prolific granter of asylum cases,” he said. “She was, I think, very measured in her application of the law, but she ends up being fired after all this, and that weighs on every other judge that’s still at the court.”
According to the latest data from TRAC, the immigration case backlog sits at 35,000 cases at Fort Snelling and over 3.3 million nationwide. At the same time, the asylum grant rate has steadily decreased to its lowest level ever since TRAC has recorded data.
The Trump administration has repeatedly made decreasing the case backlog a priority, highlighting it in various social media posts and agency statements.
Historically, Wood said, he wavered on whether the immigration court system needed complete reform, or if it was better to make improvements to the existing system. As an experienced immigration judge with a long legal career, he said he felt there was enough to work with in the existing system to make positive changes.
Now, his position has shifted.
“No matter what happens tomorrow, in three years, I don’t think it can recover from this, where we’re going to have a trusted system,” he said. “Congress sets the law, people make their claims, we make a decision, we move on. We don’t like those outcomes, we change the law.
“I think it’s irreparable, I do.”
A difficult day in court
Earlier this week at Fort Snelling Immigration Court, the wooden benches in the back of Judge Monte Miller’s courtroom were filled with asylum seekers and their families hoping to become permanent residents of the United States.
One by one, they were called by Miller to a table in front of his bench to review their cases. Those with lawyers sat quietly, letting their attorney navigate the increasingly restrictive immigration system in which their fates now rested.
Many, however, were without lawyers, left to argue their futures in the country alone.
Among them was Francisco, a Mexican father of three, with two of his children sitting quietly on the benches behind him. He had arrived in the country in 2012 on a tourist visa, and his children were U.S. born citizens. He had no apparent criminal record, Miller acknowledged, as he read Francisco’s file. When asked why he didn’t have a lawyer, Francisco replied that he had been held in detention by ICE during Operation Metro Surge, making it difficult to hire one.
Regardless, Miller sustained the government’s charge of removability against him. If he did not submit a successful application to the court before his next appearance two months from now, he would be ordered removed from the country. He should consider voluntary departure, Miller told him.
Francisco was one of several people who had charges of removability upheld that afternoon. Another man from Venezuela was denied extra time for the results of his pending Form I-130, an application for permanent U.S. residents sponsoring their family members.
One woman, after being told by Miller she had no case for asylum, opted to voluntarily depart to Guatemala. She had kidney failure, she told Miller through tears, and could not afford to wait for her case to play out in the U.S.
For Francisco, voluntary departure was not an option. He wanted to stay in the U.S. for his children, he said. But when asked by Miller what relief he was seeking from the court, Francisco’s reply was one that for many, there was no longer an answer.
“I would like to know what my options are,” he said through the court translator.
“So would 3.5 million other people,” Miller shot back.
