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Researchers allege that Boston asylum supervisor officers are “suspicious” of asylum seekers and are creating an atmosphere where lower level asylum officers feel pressured to refer cases to court or deny them. Asylum officers have a “predisposition to refer cases to immigration court,” according to the report, which is a very different kind of process.
Going to immigration court isn’t necessarily a bad thing because an asylum seeker gets another chance to plead their case. But immigration judges by nature scrutinize cases far more than asylum officers who are trained to be sensitive to trauma.
There’s also a backlog of cases at immigration court. There were 87,400 cases pending in the Boston immigration court at the end of last year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration data. Across the country, there were nearly 1.6 million pending cases at the end of 2021.
“They’re going to have a much longer process to get their cases approved because there is an enormous backlog at the Boston Immigration Court — the hearings are far out and therefore they're going to wait a few years before they have an individual hearing,” said Annelise Araujo, head of the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
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