| Asylum Decisions Depend on Judge Assigned - San Francisco and Newark Have Worst Records |
| (20 Nov 2017)
Very recent data from the Immigration Courts, current through September 2017, reveals that the outcome for asylum seekers continues to depend
on the identity of the immigration judge assigned to hear the case. In the San Francisco as well as the Newark Immigration Courts, for example, the odds of being granted asylum during FY 2012 - FY 2017 ranged between a high of 90 percent down to a low of only 3 percent depending upon which immigration judge the asylum seeker was assigned.
The two courts with the largest number of asylum cases, New York and Los Angeles, also had sizable judge-to-judge differences in asylum outcomes. In the New York Immigration Court judge denial rates ranged from a low of 3.0 percent up to a high of 58.5 percent. The disparity in asylum denial rates among the judges on the Los Angeles court ranged from a low of 29.4 percent denied to a high of 97.5 percent. Immigration judge-to-judge decision disparities have long existed and are well documented. Despite widespread concern about this problem, between 2010 and 2016 judge-to-judge decision disparities actually increased. This year's report, updated through FY 2017, shows that disparity levels had become more extreme on both the Newark and San Francisco courts. Judge-to-judge differences for the Chicago Immigration Court also increased. The Los Angeles and San Diego courts saw modest improvement. To view results for the complete list of courts see the full report at: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/490/ To view a particular judge's report, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/judgereports/ In addition, many of TRAC's free query tools - which track the court's overall backlog, new DHS filings, court dispositions and much more - have now been updated through October 2017. For an index to the full list of TRAC's immigration tools go to: http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/ If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at: http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/tracreports TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl |
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Copyright 2017