Lives in the Balance: Asylum Adjudication by the Department of Homeland Security

4. Timeliness

>> 49 4 Timeliness The Department of Homeland Security’s data reveal interesting and at times surprising patterns in asylum officer determinations of whether asylum seekers filed within the permitted one-year period.1 This chapter describes basic but crucial information about the deadline—what percentage of asylum claims were determined to have been filed late and how late these claims were filed. It also examines whether determinations of lateness differed depending on certain personal characteristics of the asylum seekers—where they came from in terms of geographic region and nationality, their age, how they entered, whether they were represented, their gender, and in which of the eight regional asylum offices they filed their affirmative claims. Chapter 5 will examine, in depth, how asylum officers administered the two statutory exceptions to the deadline for those applicants who filed late. A grant of asylum brings with it tremendous benefits, including the chance to become a lawful permanent resident and eventually an American citizen. Yet more than 30 percent of asylum applications submitted from April 16, 1998, through June 8, 2009—about 93,000 of the approximately 304,000 claims in our database—were determined to have been filed late. That is a very high number, in both percentage and absolute terms, given the nature of the U.S. government’s protection responsibilities and the potentially deadly consequences of being denied asylum if one is a bona fide refugee. To confirm the statistical significance of the data analysis presented below, we ran a binary logistic regression on the database of all cases, exploring the dependent variable of timely filing.2 Unless otherwise noted, these variables were statistically significant3 and confirmed the findings of the cross-tabulation analysis.4 In other words, even with all other variables held constant, the relationship between timely filing and each of the independent variables described below was statistically significant. Just how late were these 93,000 asylum seekers? The largest identifiable late group (about 28,000 people) filed within one year after the deadline had passed, as figure 4-1 demonstrates. They constituted 30 percent of all late filers . For 27 percent of untimely applicants, or about 25,000 asylum seekers, we do not know how late they filed because their date of entry was recorded Fig. 4-1. DHS Determinations of Lapse between Entry and Filing Fig. 4-2. Late Cases, by Fiscal Year of Filing Timeliness >> 51 as blank or unknowable.5 We do know that a significant percentage of applicants filed many years after entering the United States. Some 22,000 individuals (nearly 24 percent of all late filers) filed claims four years or more after entering the U.S.; 6,184 of these applicants (nearly 7 percent of all late filers) filed for asylum more than ten years after entry. As figure 4-2 illustrates, in recent years, asylum officers deemed a higher percentage of cases late than in earlier years. From FY 2000 through 2002, about 26 percent of asylum seekers filed late. From FY 2007 through 2009, some 36 percent filed late. That represents a 38 percent increase in the percentage of cases that asylum officers determined were untimely filed. As figure 4-3 shows, the greatest increase in filers regarded as late occurred within the group of asylum seekers determined to have filed three or more years late, from 6 percent in 1999 to just under 12 percent in 2009.6 During the most recent five-year period (FY 2005–2009), the number determined to have filed more than four years after arrival jumped by 26 percent over the previous five-year period (FY 2000–2004). Our finding that the percentage of late filers increased over time and that this was particularly true of very late filers is counterintuitive; one would expect that the deadline would minimize late filers over time. These increases could reflect a change in the behavior of the applicants. For example, in the years immediately following the enactment of the deadline, more would-be applicants might have heard the publicity surrounding the passage of the law that imposed it and filed on time as a result, but fewer knew about the deadline in later years. Perhaps in recent years there have been more applicants who lack ethnic or national communities that inform them about asylum or the deadline. Another possibility is that more news about raids and arrests of undocumented immigrants during the second administration...