Pending affirmative asylum cases by USCIS asylum office
The finding: as of Dec. 31, 2024, the affirmative asylum caseload ran through the 11 USCIS asylum offices the report lists, and it was concentrated. In that edition of the USCIS Asylum Division Monthly Statistics Report — the most recent one — 1,446,908 Form I-589 applications were pending nationally. Miami held 359,743 of them, 24.9% of the national total, followed by Houston (177,847, or 12.3%), Arlington (161,116, or 11.1%) and Chicago (155,642, or 10.8%). The smallest office caseload was New Orleans, at 35,069 (2.4%). Across the two months from Oct. 31 to Dec. 31, 2024, the national pending count rose by 63,773. As of Aug. 1, 2026, USCIS has not published a newer edition of this report — which also means the report predates the Atlanta asylum office, opened July 8, 2026; the current office map is at USCIS asylum offices by state.
Every asylum office in the report
Per the USCIS Asylum Division Monthly Statistics Report with data through Dec. 31, 2024 — the most recent edition USCIS has published (checked Aug. 1, 2026): 1,446,908 I-589 applications pending nationally, up 63,773 between Oct. 31 and Dec. 31, 2024. Counts are applications, not people — one application can include a spouse and children as dependents.
| Office | Pending (Dec 31, 2024) | Change Oct–Dec | Received (Dec) | Completed (Dec) | % of national |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arlington | 161,116 | +10,217 | 5,904 | 556 | 11.1% |
| Boston | 46,895 | +1,776 | 1,165 | 232 | 3.2% |
| Chicago | 155,642 | +9,158 | 5,972 | 1,196 | 10.8% |
| Houston | 177,847 | +10,145 | 6,483 | 1,204 | 12.3% |
| Los Angeles | 120,088 | +4,752 | 3,194 | 834 | 8.3% |
| Miami | 359,743 | +11,486 | 7,566 | 1,419 | 24.9% |
| New Orleans | 35,069 | +2,436 | 1,442 | 171 | 2.4% |
| New York | 111,992 | +2,032 | 3,167 | 2,144 | 7.7% |
| Newark | 116,276 | +6,138 | 4,188 | 784 | 8.0% |
| San Francisco | 112,231 | +5,575 | 3,333 | 437 | 7.8% |
| Tampa | 50,009 | +58 | 1,588 | 2,092 | 3.5% |
| National total | 1,446,908 | +63,773 | 44,002 | 11,069 | 100% |
Source: USCIS, Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate (RAIO), Global case system queried Jan. 28, 2025. Column sums are verified against the report's own Total row at build time. USCIS has not published a newer edition of this report (data hub and its RSS feed checked Aug. 1, 2026); DHS OHSS publishes asylum workload by nationality only, not by office.
What the data shows
- The national count rose in both months of the window. Pending applications went from 1,383,135 on Oct. 31, 2024 to 1,414,077 on Nov. 30 to 1,446,908 on Dec. 31 — an increase of 63,773 over that two-month stretch. It is a two-month change, not a quarterly one; the report’s FY2025 year-to-date table starts at October.
- In December 2024, applications arrived faster than they were completed. Nationally, 44,002 applications were received that month against 11,069 completed — receipts ran roughly four times completions. The report does not publish a processing-time or wait-time figure, and none can be derived from these three columns.
- The shares are uneven across the 11 offices. Miami’s share of the national pending total is 24.9%; Houston’s is 12.3%, Arlington’s 11.1% and Chicago’s 10.8%. At the other end of the list, New Orleans carries 2.4%. Every office’s share is in the table.
- Every figure is a count of applications, not of people. One application can include a spouse and children as dependents, so the number of people whose status depends on these cases is larger than the number of cases shown.
- The per-office columns move differently from each other. The table carries each office’s own Oct. 31 to Dec. 31 change alongside its December receipts and completions, so the composition of a given office’s total — arrivals, completions, or both — can be read row by row rather than inferred from the national figure.
The most recent published edition
This page is built on the FY2025 year-to-date edition of the USCIS Asylum Division Monthly Statistics Report, which closes at Dec. 31, 2024. That is a dated observation about data availability, not an interpretation: on Aug. 1, 2026 we checked both the USCIS immigration and citizenship data hub listing and its RSS feed, and neither carried a newer edition of this report. The DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics publishes an asylum workload series that was updated on Jul. 6, 2026, but it is broken out by nationality only, never by asylum office, so it does not extend the office-level series shown here.
The practical consequence is stated plainly: these are the newest office-level pending figures in the public record, and they are more than a year and a half old. Anything that changed after Dec. 31, 2024 — filings, completions, office openings, staffing — is not reflected in them.
Why this matters
Which asylum office holds a pending application is not a detail the applicant picks: it follows from the office that has jurisdiction over where the person lives. That is why the size of a given office’s pending count is a structural fact about the system rather than a fact about any individual case, and why the office map matters alongside the counts — which office serves each state is a separate dataset, USCIS asylum offices by state, where 41 of the 50 states and DC have no asylum office inside them.
Three limits on what this page is. It covers affirmative asylum only — applications filed with USCIS — and does not count cases pending before immigration judges, which are a separate system with separate statistics. It carries no timing estimate of any kind: the source report publishes pending, received and completed counts and nothing else, so this page contains no wait-time, years-to-clear or per-officer figure, because inventing one would not be sourced. And it does not cover the cost side of a pending case; the asylum annual fee has its own page. Nothing here assesses anyone’s eligibility or tells anyone what to file.
Method and caveats
The source is the USCIS Asylum Division Monthly Statistics Report, FY2025 year-to-date edition with data through Dec. 31, 2024, published by the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate (RAIO) and drawn from the Global case management system, queried Jan. 28, 2025 per the report’s own header. We read the pending, received and completed tables for each of the 11 asylum offices and for the national total, for October, November and December 2024, and store them unmodified. The build verifies every column sum against the report’s own Total row and refuses to write the dataset on a mismatch; the national Dec. 31, 2024 pending total, 1,446,908, was additionally cross-checked against independent published citations of the same edition.
Two derived fields are ours and are labelled as such. The share of national column is each office’s Dec. 31, 2024 pending count as a percentage of the national pending total, rounded to one decimal with Python’s round, which rounds half to even — the shares are published exactly as the dataset stores them. The change column is the difference between the Oct. 31 and Dec. 31, 2024 pending counts, a two-month change covering November and December 2024; it is not a quarterly figure and should not be annualized.
Three caveats carry over from the source. USCIS states that counts in this report may differ from counts in other USCIS reports because of the timing of data entry and of the query. Pending means an application with no served decision and no administrative closure during the period, and counts are applications, not people. And the office list is the one the report itself uses: offices that opened, closed or changed jurisdiction after Dec. 31, 2024 are not reflected. This is general information, not legal advice. The full set of open files is at MigrantUSA datasets.
Download the data: asylum_office_backlog.json — all 11 asylum offices plus the national total, with pending, received and completed counts for October, November and December 2024, the two-month pending change, and each office’s share of the national pending total. Free to reuse with attribution.
Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “Pending affirmative asylum cases by USCIS asylum office, 2026,” https://migrantusa.com/datasets/asylum-backlog-by-office/ (accessed [date]).
This is general information, not legal advice. Asylum filing rules, fees and office jurisdictions change, and the figures on this page are a snapshot of the published statistical record, not the status of any individual case. Consult an immigration attorney or an accredited legal-aid provider about your situation.