Austin Kocher, a TRAC researcher, told Border Report on Monday that the number of migrants granted asylum began to significantly increase in May and June and that the overall increase even includes nearly four months of the fiscal year during which Donald Trump was still president.

“The big takeaway … was that the approval rate had gone up during the Biden administration,” Kocher said.

However, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and reduced number of U.S. immigration court hearings that have been held, it is hard for researchers to determine exactly how and why migrants are winning their cases.

Kocher speculated that it could be due to migrants obtaining legal counsel and lawyers petitioning the courts to hear cases that they believe have a strong chance of winning asylum.

“It is really is hard to tell because of the pandemic exactly which cases are getting through,” Kocher said via Zoom.

Kocher explained that affirmative applications often were handled by conservations between USCIS officers and the applicant, not in a court setting and were much less formal.

From Fiscal Years 2001-10, about 60% of asylum applications were for affirmative cases referred by USCIS, TRAC found. But in 2016, when Trump took office, the number of defensive asylum applications began to increase, the TRAC report found.

“Now it is the vast majority of cases are defensive cases, which is they are put right into the deportation process from the very beginning,” Kocher said. “A court hearing can be very adversarial, whereas a hearing with just an asylum officer can be more of a conversation and not so confrontational.”