The door to asylum is closing in rural America — AI can help keep it open

Three years ago, an asylum seeker whose case reached a courtroom had a 50 percent chance of winning protection. Today, it’s just 6 percent.

Under a rule that took effect this summer, asylum officers can now send asylum seekers straight to immigration court without an interview — part of a broader push to tighten evidentiary standards and compress timelines to maximize deportations. Many legal practitioners have concluded that the door is effectively closed, and that fighting a case is futile. But in one of the hardest moments for immigration in recent history, amid a quiet surge in ICE arrests , legal representation matters more than ever.

Immigrants with lawyers are 4.7 times more likely to win relief than those without. Competent attorneys can help clients explore asylum as well as other relevant avenues to protection, including ones that are less commonly known. As the system grows harder to navigate, legal expertise becomes the difference between deportation and protection. Still, more than half of immigrants nationally go unrepresented , largely due to issues of affordability and access.

In rural America, the need for immigration representation is especially dire. These regions are home to roughly 1.8 million immigrants . Although they comprise only about 5 percent of the population, these immigrants play critical roles in their communities. For example, immigrants make up 28 percent of the rural agricultural workforce and 14 percent of rural surgeons and physicians. Yet, in most small towns, an immigration attorney is tough to find.

Rural areas are home to 20 percent of the U.S. population, but only 2 percent of its practicing attorneys across all areas of the law . Regions in which this shortage is particularly severe are classified as “legal deserts,” where a handful of attorneys — often working pro bono on top of full caseloads — are all that covers 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 shines: It can create meaningful capacity in systems where manpower is scarce by reducing the time spent on research and repetitive administrative work. Although this work is essential to winning cases, every hour spent doing it is an hour not spent sitting face-to-face with a client or taking on the next family waiting in the hall. As a student in the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire, I spent three summers conducting case research for a local immigration attorney at a nonprofit that supports survivors of gender-based violence. I saw firsthand how attorneys are forced to reject potentially viable cases due to limited staffing. As a result of that experience, I developed 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 across the country have already incorporated AI into their workflows. Thomson Reuters reported 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 from prison, has cut in half the time required to prepare a wrongful-conviction petition, from one year to six months. And in the first field study of its kind, researchers at the University of California-Berkeley found that 90 percent of legal aid lawyers who were given access to generative AI tools reported increased productivity — most of it from exactly the kind of research and document work that dominates an immigration caseload.

With any AI product, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of the technology, which can include hallucinated statistics and sources. But well-designed tools can mitigate these concerns substantially through the use of 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.

We talk a lot nowadays about the threat that AI may pose to jobs. What we don’t talk enough about is its potential to add capacity in sectors that are desperately under-resourced. In rural immigration law and beyond, we should be asking where AI can expand representation and services in the communities that need them most.

Ella Tesone is a high school student from Norwich, Vt. She is the founder of Asyla LLC, a social enterprise that provides AI-powered software for immigration attorneys.