Judge Nathan N. Aina
FY 2015 - 2020, San Francisco Immigration Court
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch appointed Nathan N. Aina to begin hearing cases in June 2016. Judge Aina earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1997, and a Master of Public Administration and a Juris Doctor in 2001, all from Brigham Young University. From 2002 to May 2016, Judge Aina served as an assistant chief counsel for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security, entering on duty through the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Judge Aina is a member of the Utah State Bar.
Deciding Asylum Cases
Detailed data on Judge Aina decisions were examined for the period covering fiscal years 2015 through 2020. During this period, Judge Aina is recorded as deciding 233 asylum claims on their merits. Of these, he granted 9, gave no conditional grants, and denied 224. Converted to percentage terms, Aina denied 96.1 percent and granted (including conditional grants) 3.9 percent. Figure 1 provides a comparison of Judge Aina's denial rate fiscal year-by-year over this recent period. (Rates for years with less than 25 decisions are not shown.)
Nationwide Comparisons
Compared to Judge Aina's denial rate of 96.1 percent, nationally during this same period, immigration court judges denied 66.7 percent of asylum claims. In the San Francisco Immigration Court where Judge Aina was based, judges there denied asylum 35.6 percent of the time. See Figure 2.
Judge Aina can also be ranked compared to each of the 526 individual immigration judges serving during this period who rendered at least one hundred decisions in a city's immigration court. If judges were ranked from 1 to 526 - where 1 represented the highest denial percent and 526 represented the lowest - Judge Aina here receives a rank of 35. That is 34 judges denied asylum at higher rates, and 491 denied asylum at the same rate or less often. Ranks are tallied separately for each immigration court. Should a judge serve on more than one court during this period, separate ranks would be assigned in any court that the judge rendered at least 100 asylum decisions in.
Why Do Denial Rates Vary Among Judges?
Denial rates reflect in part the differing composition of cases assigned to different immigration judges. For example, being represented in court and the nationality of the asylum seeker appear to often impact decision outcome. Decisions also appear to reflect in part the personal perspective that the judge brings to the bench.
Representation
If an asylum seeker is not represented by an attorney, almost all (88%) of them are denied asylum. In contrast, a significantly higher proportion of represented asylum seekers are successful. In the case of Judge Aina, 21.5% were not represented by an attorney. See Figure 3. For the nation as a whole, about 19% of asylum seekers are not represented.
Nationality
Asylum seekers are a diverse group. Over one hundred different nationalities had at least one hundred individuals claiming asylum decided during this period. As might be expected, immigration courts located in different parts of the country tend to have proportionately larger shares from some countries than from others. And, given the required legal grounds for a successful asylum claim, asylum seekers from some nations tend to be more successful than others.
For Judge Aina, the largest group of asylum seekers appearing before him came from Mexico. Individuals from this nation made up 63.5 % of his caseload. Other nationalities in descending order of frequency appearing before Judge Aina were: Guatemala (12.9 %), El Salvador (12%), Honduras (5.2%), Ukraine (2.1%). See Figure 4.
In the nation as a whole during this same period, major nationalities of asylum seekers, in descending order of frequency, were El Salvador (18.1%), Guatemala (15.1%), Honduras (14.7%), Mexico (11.8%), China (10.2%), India (3.7%), Cuba (2.5%), Haiti (1.8%), Cameroon (1.5%), Venezuela (1.3%), Nepal (1.3%), Nicaragua (1.1%), Bangladesh (1.0%).
