During his keynote address at a recent gala to raise money for Immigration Law and Justice of New York, Austin Kocher (a professor at Syracuse University) cites these 7 key statistics which tell the story of US immigration currently:
- 325,000 – the number of pending immigration and asylum cases in NYC
- 15 – the number of times you’re more likely to stay in the country legally if you are represented by an attorney than if you are not represented by an attorney
- 100,000 – the number of immigrants with pending cases that do not have representation
- 80% – the current denial rate for asylum cases (at the start of 2025, the denial rate was 45-50%)
- 45% – the portion of ICE arrests in June that involved immigrants without any criminal history
- 36% – the percent of the people arrested by ICE that are now in ICE detention that have no criminal history. If we include people who are arrested at the border by Customs and Border Protection, 50% of all detainees being held in detention have no criminal history
- 7,500 – the target number of refugees the US will resettle during 2026 (down from a high in recent years of 100,000).
Immigration Insight 