Had a consult yesterday with a man from Texas, he's been here on an F-1 visa and is filing for asylum. He asked a lot of good questions, so I thought I'd share some answers. Most asylum cases have to be filed within a year of entering the US.
The single biggest factor that I've seen in asylum cases is who the adjudicator is, whether it is the Asylum officer or immigration judge
Sadly there's a wide disparity in the approval rates of the various asylum offices and immigration courts.
Some judges deny 98% of asylum cases they are assigned.
TRAC rankings are listed online for immigration judges, and it's easy to look up the percent of cases each judge approves and denies.
I
f you start at the asylum office before removal proceedings begin, you'll get an asylum officer. Even depending on where the asylum office is, you have higher approval ratings in some over others, and within the offices you'll see some officers with higher approval and denial ratings.
We've filed a lot of asylum cases from Iraq that are very similar, and some officers have cross examined our clients a lot and end up denying asylum. But in other cases, asylum officers are doing whatever they can to approve asylum cases. There is a huge human element in the adjudication of asylum cases, which is rather unfortunate.
We always tell people if they have a strong case that they should take their shot.
A few weeks ago I had a client in removal and he was using asylum as a last ditch effort. He was referred to California asylum court and then moved to Missouri. California is known to be a very pro immigration state, and I wondered why he would come to the conservative belt of Missouri, as all three immigration judges have denial ratings above 75%. As it turns out, the judge he was assigned to in California had a 95% denial rating for asylum cases.
You never know which judge you're gonna get and you can't change your judge.
It's not supposed to be this way, but the biggest factor is who adjudicates your case.
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