Difference between residency and deportation depends largely on who hears the case, and where

Reuters recently found alarming inequities across U.S. immigration courts after analyzing data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the U.S. Justice Department unit that oversees immigration courts. That a difference exists across immigration circuits and across country of origin applications isn't all that surprising. However, the fact that there is such a significant difference exits should concern all those who support the establishment of an asylum system that provides applicants with the necessary protections to hear their cases.

Reuters found that one judge in New York City allowed 93 percent of applicants to stay in the country; another judge in Houston has only approved 4 percent of all requests. the immigrant’s chance of being allowed to stay in the United States depends largely on who hears the case and where it is heard. These differences exists across and within states.

• In Charlotte, immigrants are ordered deported in 84 percent of cases, more than twice the rate in San Francisco, where 36 percent of cases end in deportation.
• Immigration courts in California and the Pacific Northwest fall under the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and they rule in favor of immigrants far more often than courts in the 4th Circuit, which includes North and South Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, Reuters found.

It is not only where in the US your case is heard, but what country you come from.

• For example, courts ruled in favor of Chinese immigrants 75 percent of the time, the Reuters analysis found.
• Hondurans enjoy no special considerations. They were allowed to stay in the United States in just 16 percent of cases, the Reuters analysis found.

While we might have expected a Clinton administration to have taken minor steps towards bringing some sense to the asylum process, that is unlikely to be the case for the Trump administration. The EOIR has held training sessions for judges in the past, but none are scheduled for 2017. Rather than providing resources to better ensure that asylum applicants have opportunities to make their claims we are in the process of making that more difficult so that they can be deported more quickly.