President Donald Trump‘s aggressive deportation agenda has frequently been held up by stalling tactics used by illegal immigrants and the left-leaning organizations that back them to delay or prevent their deportation from the United States.

The long-running deportation saga of Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become one of the most high-profile of Trump’s deportation efforts to date, with the illegal immigrant using a pair of the most common tactics earlier this week as he attempts to avoid deportation to Uganda.

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But across the country, illegal immigrants and their activist lawyers are finding ways to delay deportations that might otherwise proceed quickly.

Asylum requests

One of the most common ways illegal immigrants slow or avoid their deportations is by making asylum requests. As of the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2025, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review reported 3,797,662 immigration cases pending adjudication, of which 2,372,282 had filed applications for asylum.

Under federal law, noncitizens in the U.S. may apply for asylum to seek protection if they have suffered or fear persecution due to their religion, race, nationality, social group, or political opinion. The application must be filed within a year of that person’s arrival in the U.S., and while federal statute outlines that the application be ruled upon within 180 days, the significant backlog means the process tends to go much longer.

Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, told the Washington Examiner that asylum claims are the “biggest driver of the immigration court backlog.”

“There are about 690 immigration judges; they’re hearing 3.7 million plus cases,” Arthur said. “The reason that they can’t get those cases done in a timely manner is if you don’t have any other form of relief from removal, if you’re removable and you’re not eligible for a green card or anything like that, you’re going to apply for asylum.”

“It’s going to stretch out the time you’re here, and after 180 days, you can get a work authorization. So that’s the reason why people file them, and even if you’re not eligible for asylum,” he added.

Arthur said that while the process is supposed to take at most 180 days, the backlog generally takes between 800 days and five years.

Other protections that illegal immigrants frequently apply for as they aim to prolong their stay in the U.S. include statutory withholding of removal, which prevents the applicant from being removed only to a specific country based on a threat or fear of persecution of that country, and protection under Article Three of the Convention Against Torture, which prohibits the U.S. from sending someone to a country where they are more likely than not to be tortured. Both protections, however, still allow for deportation to a compliant third country.

Abrego Garcia was denied asylum in 2019, but he did receive a statutory withholding of removal from his native El Salvador, meaning the federal government is prohibited from deporting him to his home country presently. His lawyer told a federal judge earlier this week that they plan to ask an immigration judge to reopen his immigration case and apply for asylum again.

Habeas Corpus petitions

Lawyers for illegal immigrants have also filed a flurry of habeas corpus petitions to keep their clients from being removed from the U.S. These petitions challenge a detention by law enforcement, requiring the government to justify a person’s confinement.

Arthur, who served as an immigration judge from 2006 until 2015, said these petitions from detained illegal immigrants were rare when he was on the bench but have become more common in recent years. He also noted that Congress has intentionally removed immigration jurisdiction from district courts twice, moving it instead toward federal appeals courts. He said these new habeas petitions complicate that intention.

“District court judges aren’t supposed to have any jurisdiction at all over deportation matters. Those are all supposed to go to the circuit courts, and Congress did that deliberately, because they wanted to get district court judges out of immigration determinations entirely,” Arthur said.

“[Congress] did this twice. They did it once in 1996, and then they had a problem with, you know, judges taking these things up on habeas. And then they did it again in 2005 – in the REAL ID Act of 2005 – to say you also don’t get habeas jurisdiction,” he added.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a standing order in May granting an automatic two-day pause on the deportation of an illegal immigrant who files a habeas corpus petition in that judicial district. The Justice Department sued the entire bench of judges, arguing, in part, that jurisdiction for nearly all of the petitions should, under federal law, go to the federal appeals court above the district court.

A U.S. district judge dismissed the lawsuit, but the judge did offer other venues for the Justice Department to challenge the standing order.

Efforts to restrict federal immigration enforcement

Illegal immigrant advocates have also succeeded in placing limits on cooperation between local police departments and federal officials, as well as in persuading a court to restrict how federal officials may conduct immigration operations.

A federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California issued a ruling last month that significantly restricted how federal immigration officials may go about conducting immigration raids in the Los Angeles area. The sweeping injunction was upheld by a federal appeals court, and the DOJ asked the Supreme Court earlier this month to issue an order pausing the restrictions.

The lawsuit is another example of district courts inserting themselves into immigration matters and slowing deportations.

“Courts are imposing themselves in areas in which Congress never intended them to go in these cases. If there is an issue with an alien’s arrest, if there is an issue with due process in the case, the proper venue is with the circuit court, not with the district court judge,” Arthur told the Washington Examiner.

“DOJ has been battling an expansive class action definition that district court judges are using to interpose themselves into these immigration matters,” Arthur added.

SUPREME COURT FRUSTRATED BY LOWER COURT OVERREACHES

While the administration has been slowed in courts from deporting many migrants quickly, it has continued its aggressive efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.

The Trump administration has also racked up multiple wins on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, with the justices allowing for the removal of temporary legal status and protections for various groups of noncitizens, as dozens of lawsuits over immigration policies continue across the country.