NY and Calif.’s insane asylum approval rates

Migrants who file asylum requests in New York or California are about three times more likely to get their cases approved than if they pursue them in Republican-led Texas or Florida, data show.

Sixty-one percent of cases in New York and 66% in California were approved from January through August, according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The two liberal states are the top destinations for migrants.

By contrast, in conservative Texas, only 19% of requests were granted in the same time period, and Florida approved just 23%, the data show.

In the first eight months of 2023, New York and California courts each adjudicated over 13,200 cases, both more than in the entire previous year. The next busiest courts were Texas, where judges adjudicated 7,000 cases, and Florida, where 4,000 asylum decisions were made.

The figures also show approval ratings have been increasing during the Biden administration, with California OKs rocketing from 34% of cases in 2020 to the current figure of two-thirds.

The average approval rate in asylum cases averaged 49% between 2013 and 2017 under President

Barack Obama, dropped to 32% under Donald Trump, and rose to 40% during the first months of Joe Biden’s presidency, previous TRAC data showed.

New York City’s leaders have repeatedly said they have run out of shelter space after opening 200 facilities, and that they have nowhere to put newly arriving migrants after 160,000 have come to the city since spring 2022, all asking for shelter, food and services, which Gov. Hochul estimates will cost $2 billion.

“It’s the Wild West. [Immigration courts] are understaffed, and they keep putting people into Manhattan hotels and similar facilities around the nation. It’s compounding and turning into one of the biggest traffic jams I’ve ever seen,” Michael Wildes, managing partner of law firm Wildes & Weinberg, P.C., told The Post.

Nationally, Customs and Border Protection admitted that during the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, over 900,000 people had been allowed into the country on humanitarian parole and were eligible to apply for asylum.

Due to the lengthy nature of asylum proceedings, courts are only expected to be more overwhelmed, meaning asylum-seekers are legally allowed to be in the country and in many cases allowed to work for years before their case is heard by a judge.