Asylum Roulette

In “New York Immigration Court, Asylum Roulette,” NINA BERNSTEIN writes about the game of chanmce asylum applicants play in the immmigration court.  The article starts like this:

Tears streaked Meizi Liu’s face in 2003 as she told an immigration judge in New York of being forcibly sterilized in China. The judge, Jeffrey S. Chase, had won awards as a human rights advocate before his appointment to the bench in 1995. But now he had 1,000 pending cases, and he had heard it all before. He insisted that she was lying, ridiculed her story and, when she would not recant, denied her petition for asylum. The tables turned after appeals by Ms. Liu and others reached federal court this year. In scathing decisions, the court rebuked Judge Chase for “pervasive bias and hostility,” “combative and insulting language” and remarks “implying that any asylum claim based on China’s coercive family planning policies would be presumed incredible.” It is always judgment day in the windowless courtrooms where immigrants plead to stay in the United States. But these days, as never before, the nation’s 218 immigration judges are also being judged, even as they struggle to complete 350,000 cases a year amid an immigration debate that promises to send them many more. (emphasis added).

For the entire story from the New York Times, click here.

KJ