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The Daily Signal
July 5, 2018

Society News Fact Check: Are 80% of Asylum Court Cases Not Approved?
By Emily Larson


EIOR calculates an asylum “grant rate” by comparing only explicit grants and denials, excluding cases closed for other reasons. By that calculation, with 8,726 grants and 11,643 denials, EOIR’s asylum grant rate was 43 percent in FY 2016 (or a denial rate of 57 percent). The asylum denial rate is closer to the 80 percent figure when looking at decisions for people seeking asylum from Central America and Mexico rather than all countries. A significant portion of asylum-seekers and recipients are from China, for instance, and not as relevant to the debate about the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy on the southern border. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) also calculates immigration court asylum denial rates by comparing only grants and denials. Its data on EOIR asylum decisions shows that from FY 2012 to FY 2017, the asylum denial rate was 79 percent for people from El Salvador, 88 percent for people from Mexico, 78 percent for people from Honduras and 75 percent for people from Guatemala.


Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
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