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The American people and policymakers and American public should know and have a sense of how many people are applying for asylum relief.”
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Austin Kocher, a professor with Syracuse University and a senior researcher with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks all of the immigration cases nationwide, said there were management issues under McHenry and he did not respond to the university’s repeated concerns.
“The main bulk of inaccuracies and records going missing concerned asylum applicants who were facing deportation and have applied for asylum in the immigration court system,” Kocher told Border Report.
Data from asylum cases, in particular, often went missing and got so bad by November 2019 that TRAC officials sent McHenry a letter pointing out issues they were seeing. But he said they were ignored.
“They initially ignored us, then stonewalled us and then eventually dismissed the issues outright,” Kocher said.
At one point it got so bad that TRAC for several months had to pull its asylum-case tracking tool bar offline, which is used by thousands of immigration lawyers, advocates and journalists.
He said EOIR even supplied the U.S. Supreme Court with inaccurate immigration data, which it had to walk back.
“The real problem is the American people and policymakers and American public should know and have a sense of how many people are applying for asylum relief and the outcomes of those cases. It’s really just a fundamental transparency and accountability issue and with those records missing it was presenting a very incomplete picture and potentially undermining the agency’s ability to monitor itself,” Kocher said.
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