Expert: Many Factors Influence Boston USCIS Asylum Approval Rates

Angi Gonzalez, SpectrumNews1, June 1, 2022

"Dr. Basileus Zeno, who came to the U.S. after fleeing Syria, knew that applying for asylum in the U.S would not be easy. He just never expected it to take 10 years before he was ultimately denied. He eventually moved his family to Canada after receiving the denial in 2021. "There is no transparency, zero transparency, zero accountability, so they can do whatever they want by claiming they have a backlog or they don't have enough officers ... and because they don't have really deadlines to show any decisions," said Zeno of his experience at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Boston. Immigration advocates say Zeno's story is just one example of the issues they uncovered in a recent investigation named Lives in Limbo: How the Boston Asylum Office Fails Asylum Seekers. ... Expert in Immigration law, Stephen Yale-Loehr of Cornell Law, explained that there are some outside factors that may have played a part in the Boston office's low approval rate. “There are a lot of reasons [including] high turnover of officers pressure to decide cases quickly .... if [officers] see the same kind of case over and over again, you sort of feel like you know that type of case without really probing into the individual facts of the case. ... There’s a lot of disparity in all of the USCIS asylum offices and it got worse during the Trump administration. There was pressure from headquarters to make it harder to win approval. So approval rates across the country went down, they just seem to go down more in Boston than in some of the other USCIS asylum officers,,” said Yale-Loehr, who is co-director at Cornell’s Asylum Appeals Clinic."