Under the Trump administration, the Bay Area’s two immigration courts are rejecting asylum claims at double the rate as under the previous administration, as federal officials fire immigration judges, push to clear case backlogs and vow deeper vetting of asylum seekers.

From President Donald Trump’s first full month returning to office in February through August, federal immigration judges in San Francisco and Concord denied 54% of the 4,019 asylum cases they decided, according to the latest data from University of Syracuse’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan research center that collects and analyzes immigration court data.

During the previous seven months, when Joe Biden was president, the courts rejected 26% of 3,355 cases.

Immigration experts attribute the

See Full Page