UK scraps Rwanda plan as US asylum system sees high denial rates
The UK government ended its Rwanda deportation scheme and introduced new asylum legislation, while U.S. courts report record denial rates and a backlog of pending cases.
In July 2024 the UK Government announced that it had scrapped the Rwanda Plan, a decision that followed a November 2023 Supreme Court ruling that the plan was unlawful because deporting migrants to Rwanda would breach British and international human‑rights laws and agreements, according to rescue.org.
The Prime Minister subsequently agreed to a new treaty with Rwanda and introduced the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act, rescue.org reported. Plans to set new limits on article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights are expected to result in another 11,700 people having their claims rejected, the Guardian reported. More than half of people whose asylum and visa claims will be rejected under the tightened human‑rights laws will continue to live in the UK, the Guardian added.
In the United States, immigration judges have been denying nearly 80 percent of asylum applications that come before them as of early 2026, shepelskylaw.com reported. For fiscal year 2024 the asylum denial rate reached 53 percent, a four‑percentage‑point increase from the previous year, according to quirogalawoffice.com, and in October 2024 only 35 percent of asylum cases submitted were approved, quirogalawoffice.com noted.
State denial rates in 2024 varied, with New Mexico at 86 percent, Texas at 83 percent and New Jersey at 82 percent; Utah, Nevada and Missouri recorded lower rates of 25 percent, 23 percent and 19 percent respectively, quirogalawoffice.com reported.
The U.S. asylum grant rate was 19.2 percent in August 2025, visaverge.com reported, and asylum court completions in April and May 2025 exceeded 12,000, visaverge.com added. About 3.7 million asylum cases were pending, with an average wait of roughly 900 days, visaverge.com said.
On 5 June 2026 a federal court ordered USCIS to resume processing asylum applications for citizens from 40 countries that had been blocked, visaverge.com reported. A proposal was also made to extend the asylum work‑authorization waiting period from 180 days to 365 days, visaverge.com noted.
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