USCIS asylum offices by state (2026): 13 offices in 10 states serve the whole country — 41 of the 50 states and DC have none

USCIS asylum offices by state

The finding: the entire affirmative-asylum interview system runs through 13 asylum offices and branches, and they physically sit in only 10 states — California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Virginia. Between them they cover the 58 jurisdictions the USCIS Office Locator lists (the 50 states, DC, Puerto Rico, and six territories and freely associated states), which leaves 41 of the 50 states and DC with no asylum office inside their borders. The widest jurisdiction belongs to Chicago: 15 states, and 5,721,932 foreign-born residents — about 5.7 million people covered by one office. The newest office is Atlanta, which has been interviewing since July 8, 2026.

Every office and every state

Per the USCIS Office Locator (checked July 25, 2026): 13 asylum offices and branches serve 58 jurisdictions; the offices physically sit in just 10 states, and 41 of the 50 states and DC have no asylum office in-state. Foreign-born population per state: Census ACS 2024 5-year, table B05012.

The 13 asylum offices — jurisdiction and population served

Jurisdictions overlap where two or more offices serve the same state — office totals do not sum to a national total. Territories carry no population figure (table B05012 does not cover them).

Every state — which asylum office serves it

† Alabama — sources conflict: the locator routes it to Arlington (ZAR) (verified by state and by ZIP codes 36109 and 35203 on July 25, 2026), while the July 1, 2026 USCIS alert says the new Atlanta office's jurisdiction covers Georgia and Alabama. Confirm the location on your interview notice.

What the data shows

• A jurisdiction can be an ocean wide. Alaska is served from San Francisco. Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico and Oklahoma are served from Houston. Hawaii, Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands and Palau are served from the Los Angeles office, which is physically in Tustin, California. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are served from Miami.
• Chicago covers the most states; the California offices cover the most people. Chicago’s 15-state jurisdiction is the widest of the 13 by state count, with 5,721,932 foreign-born residents. By population served, San Francisco (12,889,322) and Los Angeles (12,424,152) are bigger, because California sits in both jurisdictions. That overlap is exactly why office totals cannot be added into a national figure.
• A few places have two or three offices; most have none. Florida has two (Miami and Tampa). The New York–New Jersey corridor has three (New York, in Bethpage; Newark; and the Newark - Manhattan Branch at 201 Varick Street in New York City), and New York State’s row lists all three. Against that, 41 of the 50 states and DC have no asylum office at all.
• Atlanta is the newest office on this map. USCIS announced it on July 1, 2026 and began interviews on July 8, 2026 at three locations at once — the Atlanta asylum office, the Atlanta Field Office, and the Montgomery, Alabama Field Office — with a permanent location expected in 2027.
• Representatives now appear in person. As of May 18, 2026, the USCIS Service and Office Locator states that legal representatives must attend asylum interviews in person, except in limited circumstances. Where to find a recognized representative, by state, is on our BIA-recognized free legal help page.

Alabama: two USCIS sources disagree

The Office Locator routes Alabama to Arlington, Virginia (ZAR) — verified on July 25, 2026 through the state lookup and through ZIP-code lookups for 36109 (Montgomery) and 35203 (Birmingham). The July 1, 2026 USCIS alert announcing the new Atlanta office says that office’s jurisdiction “covers Georgia and Alabama,” with interviews available at a Montgomery, Alabama site. Both are current USCIS sources, and they do not agree. The dataset and the table show Alabama the way the locator routes it, with the conflict carried verbatim in the row’s note and a link to the alert — we do not resolve it silently. Confirm the office and address printed on your interview notice.

Why this matters

The asylum office that holds jurisdiction over where a person lives is the office that handles the affirmative-asylum interview. That makes office placement a plain access fact: in the 10 states with an office, the interview venue may be a local trip; from Alaska it is a jurisdiction seated in San Francisco, from Wyoming one seated in Houston, from Guam one seated in Tustin, California. Distance is measurable — travel, time off work, cost — and it is set by where the offices are, not by anything about the case.

Three limits on what this page is. It covers affirmative asylum only — the USCIS interview track for Form I-589 filings; defensive asylum is heard in the EOIR immigration courts, a separate system, and the difference between the two tracks is explained on our affirmative and defensive asylum page. It does not cover fees, filing steps or timelines — the separate asylum annual fee is its own page. And it does not assess anyone’s eligibility or tell anyone what to file: it is categorical information about where the offices are and whom they serve.

Method and caveats

Each of the 58 jurisdictions in the USCIS Office Locator’s asylum-office state list was looked up individually on July 25, 2026, recording the serving asylum office or offices and the address exactly as the locator returns them; Alabama was additionally checked by ZIP code (36109 and 35203). Foreign-born population per state is the US Census Bureau’s ACS 2024 5-year estimates, table B05012 (nativity). An office’s “foreign-born served” is the sum over the states it serves that have census data — and because two or more offices share several states, office totals do not sum to a national figure. Puerto Rico and the six territory and freely-associated rows carry no population figure, because table B05012 does not cover them; the count of 41 jurisdictions with no in-state office is taken across the 50 states and DC, with the territory rows excluded.

Two things are deliberately out of scope this pass. There is no pending-caseload figure per office — USCIS publishes quarterly workload data, but it was not verified for this build and is queued as a later enrichment. And office locations, jurisdictions and procedures change: confirm your asylum office on your interview notice and at the USCIS locator. This is general information, not legal advice. The full set of open files is at MigrantUSA datasets.

Download the data: asylum_office_access.json — all 58 jurisdictions with the serving office(s), whether an office is in-state, and foreign-born population; plus all 13 offices with address, jurisdiction list and population served. Free to reuse with attribution.

Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “USCIS asylum office access by state, 2026,” https://migrantusa.com/datasets/asylum-office-access/ (accessed [date]).

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Newsrooms, legal-aid clinics, law-school programs and immigrant-services organizations: drop in the panel below. It shows how many asylum offices exist, how many states have none, and the widest jurisdiction — and it updates when USCIS changes the map.

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<p style="font-size:12px">Source: <a href="https://migrantusa.com/datasets/asylum-office-access/">MigrantUSA — USCIS asylum offices by state</a></p>