A Culture of No

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The fate of people seeking asylum in the United States is determined not just by the legitimacy of their claims, but by where they land. This is the story of how one immigration court in Texas has shut the door on those seeking refuge in America.

The El Paso Processing Center, informally known as the Camp, is a sprawling, walled-in compound of low-lying cinder-block buildings and trailers tucked between the landing strip at El Paso International Airport and the Lone Star Golf Club, a public course that sits just across the street. The Camp houses around 800 immigrants at any given time—some awaiting deportation, some awaiting their hearings or appeals. Some pass through for a day; others stay for years.

Wassim Isaac, a thirty-two-year-old Syrian with ginger hair and impeccable manners, had been at the Camp for a little over a year by the time we met, in December 2017—his asylum denied, his appeal wending its way through the system. Isaac, who asked that I not use his real name, told me he'd been the owner of a pharmacy back in Syria, describing himself as a college-educated, law-abiding churchgoer, details supported by a cache of notarized, translated, verified records. When Isaac first arrived at the Camp, he repeatedly asked himself how he had come to be incarcerated. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) designates the Camp as a "holding and processing facility," but as far as Isaac could tell, it was a prison. "Like in the movies," he said flatly.

He would be stuck in the facility, he posited, for who knew how long, having been refused asylum for reasons he couldn't quite grasp. The judge had initially implied that Isaac, a Christian fleeing both militiamen and Islamic extremists, had a convincing case, but then, in an abrupt about-face, denied him. "Is it personal? No," Isaac said, perplexed. "Related to the law? Political?" Eventually, he concluded that trying to make sense of his predicament was an exercise in futility. He decided instead to look at his captivity from the US government's point of view. "In their opinion, I make a crime because I come here with no visa," he told me. "I convince myself. I say, 'Okay, I am illegal. I am illegal.'"

In fact, Isaac had not committed a crime. He had not slipped into the country outside a designated port of entry—a misdemeanor or, if done repeatedly, a felony. Instead, in the early afternoon of October 2, 2016, Isaac joined a throng of people in the pedestrian lane of the Paso del Norte Bridge, which divides Mexico's Ciudad Juárez from El Paso, Texas. Below the bridge ran the physical border between the two nations: a trickle of the Rio Grande, no deeper than a puddle, clogged with trash. When he reached the front of the line, he used broken English to inform a border agent that he was a Syrian national in need of protection. In doing so, he had behaved in accordance with both international human-rights law and US immigration law. He had also crossed into the El Paso jurisdiction, which, though he didn't know it at the time, was one of the worst places in America to seek asylum.

Immigration courts are administrative bodies, divided into regional districts that have developed starkly different patterns of adjudication. Between 2012 and 2017, for example, the New York City court approved close to 80 percent of applications for asylum, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which analyzes government data on immigration. In Miami, the approval rate was 30 percent. In El Paso, judges approved asylum seekers at an average rate of just over 3 percent.

This gross imbalance was the focus of a 2007 study, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, which demonstrates, with disquieting statistics, how rulings vary across the US—not only among jurisdictions, but within them as well...