Putting TRAC to Work
Legal and Scholarly
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University
February 19, 2017
(Un)Equal Justice Under the Law: Analyzing the Impact of Gender Synchrony and Muslim Religion on Asylum Outcomes in the United States By Alex William Silberman
	The literature on asylum adjudicators indicates that there is significant variation in asylum grant rates between individual asylum adjudicators (that is more than random error), and that at least a portion of that variation is correlated with asylum officers’ demographic characteristics. For example, a quantitative analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearing House (TRAC) found that, for 297,240 asylum cases between 1994 and 2005, asylum denial rates among immigration judges varied considerably even after controlling for the country of origin of asylum applicants. While it stopped short of identifying a specific cause for judge-by-judge denial rate variation, the report concluded, “These findings directly challenge the [Executive Office for Immigration Review]’s commitment to providing a ‘uniform application of the nation's immigration laws in all cases” (TRAC 2006). External Link
	Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University Copyright 2017