Are immigration courts and judges—part of the administrative apparatus but not Article III federal courts—adhering to legal adjudication standards and remaining impartial in reviewing asylum cases, particularly related to gender-based claims? That is the question Associate Professor of Political Science and Herbert Kurz ’41 Chair in Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties Anna O. Law attempts to answer in a recently published research paper funded through a grant from the Division of Law and Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) titled, “With Fear, Favor, and Flawed Analysis: Decision-Making in U.S. Immigration Courts.” The work dates back to 2017 when Law started working with Brooklyn College graduate Karen Musalo ’73, now a professor and chair in international law and director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. The team was granted unprecedented access to a repository of immigration court asylum decisions from around the country stored at the center. According to their paper, the data was consistent with other past scholarly findings that showed that the previous work background and gender of immigration judges affected case outcomes, with male judges and those with enforcement backgrounds denying protection at higher rates. Another important trend revealed the most common reasons why immigration judges denied protection to credible asylum seekers were that they failed to meet the “extremely stringent requirements of two elements of the refugee definition—elements which arguably are overly restrictive and inconsistent with international norms.” Law is also the author of The Immigration Battle in American Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and has published in social science and law journals. She hopes that this first-time qualitative and quantitative review of this data will make a significant contribution to finding answers and solutions moving forward regarding the system. “We have heard anti-migrant advocates assert that asylum applicants are liars or filing frivolous claims, and our data shows that they are not; immigration judges often find applicants credible,” Law said. “Instead, people seeking the protection of asylum as they are allowed to do under international and domestic law are being denied for legal technicalities and other reasons not having to do with their credibility.” Some potential solutions the paper explores include: the creation of Article I immigration courts; more stringent hiring standards and continuing education for judges; increased diversity of immigration judges based on employment experience; and reduced federal court deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals in reviewing cases and allocating additional resources to immigration adjudication. “Given that immigration courts adjudicate the largest number of asylum claims in the immigration bureaucracy and few will be appealed to higher levels of the administrative law system or federal courts because of the time and cost involved, we hope our study sheds light on the operation of these courts that constitute the base of the pyramid,” Law added. The research team also included two Brooklyn College political science graduates, Jacob Smith ’18 and Kinga Szlachcic ’23, along with Annie Daher, an asylum and immigration law attorney and formerly senior staff attorney at the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies; Katharine M. Donato, the Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University; and Chelsea Meiners, who holds a Master of Arts in Latin American studies from Georgetown University and currently works in international development.
