Court bolsters asylum appeals
Ruling broadens grounds to protest denials by feds
A federal appeals court in California ruled Thursday that migrants who fail the initial step to qualify for asylum in the U.S. should be able to fully appeal the rejection in U.S. courts.
Under U.S. law, migrants who don’t establish a “credible fear” of returning to their home country – a test by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers – now can appeal the decision to an immigration judge only on minor, technical grounds. In its decision, the appeals court concluded the law violates decades of judicial rulings granting constitutional protection to noncitizens.
“The historical and practical impor-
tance of this ruling cannot be overstated,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt. “This decision reaffirms the Constitution’s foundational principle that individuals deprived of their liberty must have access to a federal court.”
In the decision, the judges wrote: “We think it obvious that the constitutional minimum … is not satisfied by such a scheme.”
The ruling comes as record numbers of migrant families and children, most of them from Central America, try to enter the U.S. to request asylum, and it could give them another avenue to plead their case. And the ruling could add to an immigration court backlog that is already drowning under 800,000 cases with not enough judges to process them.
Immigration judges have been turning down the limited “credible fear” appeals at a far higher rate since President Donald Trump took office. By June 2018, only about 15 percent of applicants who appealed to immigration judges were found to have established a credible fear, down from about 33 percent for the same month in 2017, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC.
Gelernt, who argued the appeal, said migrants who failed their initial asylum hearings are fast-tracked out of the country through “expedited removal” proceedings, quickly ending any hope they have of finding safety in the U.S.
With Thursday’s ruling, Gelernt said all rejected asylumseekers in the 9th Circuit – which includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington – will immediately be able to request an appeal from a federal judge.
The Justice Department may seek an emergency stay from the Supreme Court, but the department did not immediately respond to questions about its plans.
Thursday’s case involves Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, a Sri Lankan native who is part of the Tamil ethnic minority group battling for independence for decades. He says he has been kidnapped, beaten, and tortured for supporting a Tamil political candidate.
He crossed the southern border in California in February 2017 and was arrested, then requested asylum. A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agent who found he had not established a “credible fear” of returning to his home country.