Many of the tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived in New York City over the last several years say they share the same hope: to be granted asylum so they can legally stay in the United States permanently.
But while New York is a beacon for many migrants, with a law guaranteeing shelter and pro-immigration political traditions, its asylum office is also the toughest place to win a claim in the country, records show.
Even before the recent influx of border crossers, New York’s federal asylum office granted the lowest share of asylum claims among the nearly dozen such offices around the country, according to a 2022 analysis by the nonprofit Human Rights First. In 2020, when 28 percent of asylum claims were granted nationally, 5 percent of decisions in New York were approvals.
The asylum process was never meant to be a catchall program to allow most people arriving in the United States to remain. To be granted asylum, applicants must prove they have suffered persecution or have a “well-founded fear” of it in their home country on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. The approval process is arduous by design.
But asylum offices in New York and elsewhere have been flooded with applications since 2022, as migration has surged and those who arrive here pursue one of the few pathways to staying in the United States legally. So far this year, the New York office has already received nearly 25,000 claims.
The stated mission of asylum officers — who work for the nonenforcement wing of the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services — is to identify people who qualify as refugees under U.S. and international law.
The New York office has long been known to be especially strict, according to interviews with nearly a dozen immigration lawyers and 10 current or former asylum officers familiar with the New York office, including seven who worked there at various times. Almost all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Fixing the overburdened and often dysfunctional asylum system has become an urgent national crisis. President Biden this week announced he would sign an executive order allowing him to seal the southern border to asylum seekers, his most aggressive move yet to restrict immigration.
The New York office has historically received about the same volume of claims as others where rejection rates are much lower, and the demographics of migrants have typically been similar to other offices around the country. But asylum officers who worked in the New York office said they often felt pressure to move quickly, to grill asylum seekers in search of fraud and to reject cases where asylum might be granted at another office.
The high rejection rate in the New York office means that many more cases end up in immigration courts, which are part of the Justice Department, in what can be a costly and lengthy process. And ultimately the vast majority of the requests for asylum referred to New York immigration courts — close to nine in 10 in some years — were granted by judges, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Migrants are allowed to wait in the United States until their cases are resolved, so claims that are rerouted through the courts often mean people stay in limbo longer before the government decides if they can stay, or if they must go back home.
Applying for asylum involves assembling as much evidence as possible that migrants have faced persecution, which can include police reports, medical reports or witness testimony from a home country. They also must prove to an asylum officer that they are who they say they are and that they could face danger if returned to their home countries.
Across the country, even strong claims are often denied because they don’t meet the standard of evidence, said Larry Gollub, who began as an asylum officer in nearby Newark in 1992 and later trained officers until 2019. But, he added that since the office opened, “New York had this hard-core fraud-finding background.”
The office’s hard-nosed approach deepened after an investigation that uncovered a fraud operation involving thousands of mostly Chinese applicants, officers said. The case was over a decade ago, but workers in the office said it appeared to shape how the office viewed asylum seekers.
Migrants who live in Manhattan or the Bronx can apply through the New Jersey office, where a much larger share of claims have historically been approved. Migrants in most of downstate New York must apply in the New York office in Bethpage, on Long Island.
The New York office is a “hostile environment,” said Anwen Hughes, director of legal strategy for refugee programs at Human Rights First, which handles hundreds of asylum cases each year.
The immigration agency declined to make an official available for an interview. In an emailed statement, it said that it was committed to breaking down barriers in the immigration system and to creating a positive work environment. The agency also said that asylum officers were expected to adjudicate every application “fairly, humanely and efficiently on a case-by-case basis.”
The New York office is widely known for being fast, but particularly grueling, officers said, and many said it felt impossible to evaluate each case thoroughly. Officers who worked in New York said that a longtime director and some supervisors would remind them to hurry along during interviews, by pointing at a watch or sending them messages.
Officers who were temporarily brought in from the refugee division to help clear the backlogs fared no better.
“Every refugee officer that went to work there was stressed out, burned out, frustrated, felt bullied and badgered to produce more work in less time,” said Michael Knowles, who became an asylum officer in 1992 and serves as spokesman for A.F.G.E. Council 119, the union that represents asylum officers.
The challenges are well known to immigration lawyers, said Faiza Sayed, director of the Safe Harbor immigration clinic at Brooklyn Law School. A Safe Harbor report published last fall found that officers in New York faced extreme time pressures and the threat of losing their jobs if they did not keep up, and that this led them to refer legitimate cases to the courts.
Applicants with common claims or those from countries with high volumes of asylum seekers were often viewed more skeptically, some officers said. Supervisors who were suspicious of claims that had been approved sometimes returned them to officers for additional research, interviewing or rewriting, with no extra time given.
Bertha Rodriguez, a managing attorney with the Community Resource Center, a social services organization in Mamaroneck, N.Y., said asylum officers in New York would sometimes ask the same question over and over, which can confuse applicants and elicit different answers. She recalled an officer repeatedly asking one of her clients, who had a religion-based asylum claim, about why he loved Jesus and Christianity.
“It feels like they’re trying to find a reason to deny,” she said.
Sara Escobar applied for asylum in the New York office after arriving in the United States in 2014 as an unaccompanied minor. She received an appointment five years later. An asylum officer listened to her claim, based on the sexual violence and death threats she experienced in El Salvador, and then rejected her case.
She waited five more years for her day in the federal court system. By then she had a daughter and faced the possibility of being separated from her.
“But then I said to God, ‘It’s in your hands. You have the last word. You can touch the judge’s heart,’” she said. “And he did.”
In February, 10 years after first entering the country, Ms. Escobar was granted asylum.