Only 1.6 Percent of Mexicans Seeking US Political Asylum Are Accepted Valori Corral-Nava - VOXXI
go to original June 30, 2014

EL PASO — Only 1.6 percent of Mexicans seeking political asylum in the United States have been approved in the last five years, while the national approval rate during this same time for all asylum requests was 49.4 percent.

Approval rates for asylum cases vary by district and according to national statistics two of six immigration judges in El Paso have among the lowest asylum approval rates in the nation. Judge William L. Abbott denied asylum requests to 80.1 percent of applicants and Judge Thomas C. Roepke’s denial rate is 96.3 percent.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a nonpartisan center based at Syracuse University, tracks the enforcement activities of the federal government. TRAC analyzed the decisions of 273 immigration judges that have ruled in at least 100 political asylum cases in the last five years. The analysis of the decisions by United States immigration court judges in El Paso found that Roepke has the 4th highest denial rate in the nation while Abbott has the 47th highest denial rate in TRAC’s Report. Neither judge Roepke nor judge Abbott responded to repeated Borderzine requests for interviews for this story.

The top five countries seeking asylum in the United States are China, Mexico, India, Russia, and Iran according to a report released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Asylum Trends in Industrialized Countries in 2012.

The U.S. Department of Justice reported that 28,512 applications for asylum from Mexico were received by the Immigration Courts in the United States during the past five years, however only 466 applicants were approved.

Read the rest at VOXXI

Photo: AP/Reed Saxon

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