A new report out from the Transactional Records Clearinghouse, Syracuse University, finds that asylum applications are handled extremely uneventy by immigration judges.
TRAC’s Immigration Judges report, released July 31, 2006, shows vast differences in the rate at which the nation’s 200-plus immigration judges decline hundreds of thousands of applications for asylum in the United States. In one recent period, for example, while ten percent of the judges denied asylum in 86% or more of the their decisions, another ten percent denied asylum in only 34% of theirs. The Immigration Court, a branch of the Justice Department, asserts in a mission statement that it is committed to the “uniform application of the immigration law in all cases.” Yet at one end of the scale was a Miami judge who turned down 96.7% of the asylum requests. At the other end was a New York judge who rejected only 9.8%.
