Remain in Mexico has a 0.1% asylum grant rate
LA Times, Dec 15, 2019

Bryan thought it would take him about a month to get from Honduras to the United States last year.

He was 19 at the time, living by himself, and had already been kidnapped by local gangs once. Men stripped him naked, checked his bodies for tattoos that are seen as a sign of gang affiliation there and beat him after they found none. When the men were done, they gave Bryan three seconds to run away.

So, in October 2018, when Bryan heard that a migrant caravan was heading to the U.S.-Mexico border, he decided to tag along.

It did take Bryan a month to get to the border. What he didn’t realize was that that was only the beginning of a yearlong struggle to request asylum.

That’s because Bryan arrived at the border at a time when the Trump administration had begun making drastic changes to U.S. asylum policy.

Over the last year, in the name of national security, those changes have made it increasingly difficult for migrants to win asylum cases in the U.S. The latest change has effectively made the majority of non-Mexican migrants ineligible for asylum, according to lawyers and activists.

One policy in particular, called Migrant Protection Protocols or Remain in Mexico, has made it nearly impossible for migrants to receive asylum.

Data show that, as of September, of the more than 47,000 people in the program, fewer than 10,000 had completed their cases. Of that group, 5,085 cases were denied while 4,471 cases were dismissed without a decision being made — mostly on procedural grounds.

Only 11 cases — or 0.1% of all completed cases — resulted in asylum being granted, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

Bryan was not one of those 11 cases. He is currently waiting to be deported back to Honduras. He’s still afraid of the gangs. He asked the San Diego Union-Tribune not to use his last name because he was afraid they would identify him.

That 0.1% grant rate is significantly lower than the 20% who were granted asylum outside of the Remain in Mexico process, according to data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.


More: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/sto...ylum-grant-rate

Would this be a good place to post Snoopy's happy dance?