A recent report indicates that there has been a significant disparity in the approval rates of asylum cases in the United States over the past five years, which appears to be closely related to the judges and the regions where the applications are processed.
According to the latest report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, covering the period from 2019 to 2024, out of personal asylum decisions made by over 800 immigration judges, two judges have a 100% denial rate, while one judge rejected only 1% of cases.
The two judges with high denial rates are located in Texas, while the judge with a low denial rate is based in California.
Even within the same court, there can be significant differences in denial rates among different judges. For example, the San Francisco Immigration Court has the widest disparity in judge denial rates, with the highest judge denial rate at 91.6% and the lowest at only 1.3%, a difference of over 90 percentage points.
Following San Francisco is the New York Immigration Court, where the difference between the highest and lowest denial rates is as high as 89 percentage points, followed by the Arlington and Sacramento Immigration Courts.
On average, over half of asylum applications in the United States have been rejected in the past five years.
According to a TRAC report released in November, the national asylum denial rate from 2019 to 2024 stands at 57.7%.
The report emphasizes that approving or denying asylum applications is one of the most critical decisions immigration judges have to make. Therefore, understanding how asylum decisions vary over time, across courts, and among judges is crucial.
“The clear lessons of the past few decades should not be ignored. Our current system has failed to promptly and fairly resolve cases for many asylum seekers. Often, both of these objectives have not been met,” the TRAC report states.
One of the reasons for the significant differences in asylum case outcomes may be that certain courts receive fewer valid asylum applications.
Typically, asylum seekers would submit their applications to the court closest to where they reside. The report notes that immigrants from the same country often live in the same communities, suggesting that there may be some correlation between their reasons for seeking asylum and the outcomes of their applications.
TRAC indicates that other important factors that may influence asylum outcomes include whether the applicant is represented by an experienced immigration attorney, as well as the volume and scale of immigration cases assigned to each judge and court.
“Although denial rates are influenced by each judge’s judicial philosophy, they are also affected by other factors such as the types of cases the judge is hearing, the detainment status of the applicants, current immigration policies, and other external factors beyond the judge’s control,” the TRAC report notes.
To date, over 3.7 million immigration cases are still pending processing.