A study of 133,000 asylum decisions by 884 asylum officers over a seven year period has found “the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge.”
The study, Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication, was released today on SSRN and will be published in 60 Stanford Law Review. See the article Big Disparities in Judging of Asylum Cases in todays New York Times for more coverage.