WASHINGTON — An examination of thousands of immigration cases has found wide disparities in the rate at which judges grant asylum to people seeking haven in the United States, according to a study released Sunday by a private research group.
One judge in Miami denied 96.7 percent of the asylum cases before him in which the petitioner had a lawyer. It was the highest denial rate in the nation between the beginning of the fiscal year 2000 and the first few months of fiscal year 2005, the study found. In contrast, a New York judge granted asylum in all but 9.8 percent of such cases.
Ten percent of the nation's immigration judges denied asylum cases in 86 percent or more of their decisions, while another 10 percent of judges denied asylum cases in 34 percent of their rulings during that same time period, the study found.
The report, which examined 297,240 immigration cases from fiscal year 1994 through the first few months of fiscal year 2005, was done by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group connected to Syracuse University. The data was collected from the Justice Department, which oversees the nation's immigration courts.
Because of factors that included changes in immigration law, the clearinghouse divided the asylum cases into two groups, those decided from 1994 to 1999, and those decided from 2000 to 2005.
The study found wide variations in how different nationalities were treated. It reported that more than 80 percent of asylum seekers from Haiti and El Salvador were denied asylum for the period beginning in 2000, while fewer than 30 percent of asylum seekers from Afghanistan or Myanmar, formerly Burma, were denied.
David Burnham, co-director of the research group, said the findings seemed to call into question the government's "commitment to providing a uniform application of the nation's immigration laws in all cases."
Burnham said a copy of the report had been provided to the Justice Department. A spokesman for the Justice Department did not return calls for comment on Sunday.