Three years ago, an asylum seeker who reached a courtroom had a 50 percent chance of winning protection. Today, that figure has collapsed to just 6 percent, reflecting a dramatic shift in the nation's immigration enforcement landscape.
Under a rule implemented this summer, asylum officers can now bypass interviews and send asylum seekers directly to immigration court, part of a broader effort to tighten evidentiary standards and accelerate timelines to maximize deportations. Many legal practitioners now believe the door to asylum is effectively closed, making the fight seem futile. Yet, amid a quiet surge in ICE arrests, legal representation has never been more critical.
Immigrants with lawyers are 4.7 times more likely to win relief than those without. Competent attorneys can help clients explore asylum and other, less well-known avenues to protection. As the system becomes increasingly complex, legal expertise can be the difference between deportation and safety. However, more than half of immigrants nationally go unrepresented, largely due to cost and access barriers.
In rural America, the need is especially acute. These regions are home to roughly 1.8 million immigrants, who make up about 5 percent of the population but play vital roles in their communities. For instance, immigrants constitute 28 percent of the rural agricultural workforce and 14 percent of rural surgeons and physicians. Yet, in most small towns, finding an immigration attorney is nearly impossible.
Rural areas are home to 20 percent of the U.S. population but only 2 percent of its practicing attorneys across all legal fields. These "legal deserts" often have a handful of attorneys, frequently working pro bono on top of full caseloads, covering thousands of square miles. Clients often cannot pay, and the nearest courthouse may be hours away.
It is in these rural legal deserts that AI can have an outsized impact. The typical asylum application requires roughly 50 to 75 hours of dedicated research, case management, and document review over several months. This type of work is where AI excels: it can create meaningful capacity in systems where manpower is scarce by reducing time spent on research and repetitive administrative tasks. Although this work is essential to winning cases, every hour spent on it is an hour not spent face-to-face with a client or taking on the next family waiting in the hall.
Ella Tesone, a high school student from Norwich, Vermont, experienced this firsthand while conducting case research for a local immigration attorney at a nonprofit supporting survivors of gender-based violence. She saw attorneys forced to reject potentially viable cases due to limited staffing. This inspired her to develop AI research software designed to help attorneys compile sources for asylum claims, allowing them to take on more cases.
The use of AI in law is quickly becoming commonplace. Many law firms and legal organizations have already integrated AI into their workflows. Thomson Reuters reports that their AI for Justice program has allowed legal nonprofits to prepare urgent case materials up to 75 percent faster. The Innocence Center, which focuses on freeing wrongfully convicted people, has cut the time required to prepare a wrongful-conviction petition from one year to six months. In the first field study of its kind, researchers at the University of California-Berkeley found that 90 percent of legal aid lawyers using generative AI tools reported increased productivity, mostly from the research and document work that dominates an immigration caseload.
With any AI product, limitations must be acknowledged, including the potential for hallucinated statistics and sources. But well-designed tools can mitigate these concerns through audit logs and source verifiability requirements. They also require attorney oversight and direction. Ultimately, AI's value lies in its potential as a source of leverage for attorneys, not as a replacement for them.
While much of the discourse around AI focuses on threats to jobs, its potential to add capacity in desperately under-resourced sectors is often overlooked. In rural immigration law and beyond, we should be asking where AI can expand representation and services in the communities that need them most. As the GOP's immigration balancing act risks alienating voters before midterms, and as legal immigrants lose Medicaid under recent cuts, the stakes for vulnerable populations have never been higher. AI may offer a lifeline in the rural communities where the need is greatest.
