Asylum Granted at Lower Rates in Fast-Tracked Cases: Research

Sandra Sanchez, Border Report, Dec. 1, 2022

"Fast-tracked immigration cases appear to be hurting migrants’ chances of being granted asylum, researchers are finding. “The big takeaway message is that the Biden administration really is trying to speed up cases but data shows when you speed up cases they lose,” Syracuse University professor and researcher Austin Kocher told Border Report as he toured the South Texas border on Wednesday. Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, one of the nation’s leading researchers on immigration court cases, on Tuesday released a study that found that since July, asylum grant rates have fallen and it “coincides with the extremely rapid increase in expedited cases.” ... “We definitely know that the Biden administration has tried to accelerate these cases to try to clear out the backlog,” Kocher said. “They really are taking the backlog seriously and they really do want asylum cases to get decided more quickly but the problem is, as the data shows, that if you really speed cases up individuals don’t always have time to get attorneys and they don’t always have time to gather the full application materials that are necessary.” TRAC reports nationwide there are 1.9 million active pending immigration cases.