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“The Administration’s policies to expel and endanger refugees and asylum seekers from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries send a message of callousness, cruelty, and disregard for human rights that feeds our adversaries’ agenda to cast doubt on the United States’ exceptional role as a beacon of freedom and democracy,” Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Ben Cardin, D-Md., wrote in a letter to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday.
Between October last year and March 2020, the latest data available, 64 percent of the asylum claims made by Cubans and 61 percent of the claims made by Nicaraguans were denied, according to data from the immigration courts obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
Forty-five percent of those made by Venezuelans fleeing the largest humanitarian crisis in the region were also denied. And a staggering 89 percent of asylum seekers from Haiti, a country not mentioned in the letter but struggling with poverty, gang violence and political instability, had their cases rejected by U.S. immigration judges
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