Playing Refugee Roulette with Children’s Lives

The Associated Press reports that the approval of children’s asylum applications tends to vary by region, with asylum applicants in Los Angeles and San Francisco faring significantly better than those in Chicago and Houston. In San Francisco, for instance, 86 percent of children seeking asylum were granted, whereas those in Chicago were granted only 15 percent of the time. The article covers affirmative applications filed with USCIS by unaccompanied minors.  Usually, the presence of a family members in a particular region of the country determines where the child will live (and thus where the application is filed).

But we have known for years, thanks to the influential Stanford Law Review article by Philip Schrag, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Andrew Schoenholtz, that seeking asylum in the US is similar to playing roulette.