Immigration Officials Urge Greater Toughness On Asylum Interviews As Number Of Applications From Central Americans Grows

The chief of the asylum division at US Citizenship and Immigration Services has ordered officers who review immigrants’ cases at the first step of the process -- in which the claim they face “credible fear” of persecution back home is verified -- to adopt tougher practices. In a Feb. 28 memo obtained by the Los Angeles Times this week, USCIS head John Lafferty wrote that immigrants should have to “demonstrate a substantial and realistic possibility” of winning their asylum case when it goes before a judge, saying that officers had been approving cases which saw “only a minimal or mere possibility of success.”

The memo comes as credible fear claims along the US border have increased sevenfold over the last five years, largely due to an influx of migrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, where drug violence continues to consume cities. A truce brokered between gangs in 2012 in the latter two countries proved unstable, and after a brief decline in the murder rate in 2013, homicides are back in the rise. In El Salvador, an average of 6.83 people were killed per day in 2013, and in the first month of 2014 the rate rose to 9.4 per day.

Some Republican lawmakers have taken notice of the surge in credible fear claims. In a letter sent to now former head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano last summer, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) cited a debunked news report in raising fears of “a recent surge of foreign nationals, largely from Mexico” who were filing credible fear claims to allow them to enter the country, then disappearing when released from detention. Goodlatte argued that credible fear applicants should remain in detention until they went before a judge -- a process which government guidelines say should take about 111 days, but which often takes considerably longer.

According to the LA Times, Lafferty wrote in the memo that the number of credible fear referrals had risen by over 250 percent between fiscal year 2012 and 2013, adding that the modification in asylum officers’ guidelines had been performed "in light of the increased allocation of resources devoted to credible fear adjudications and the attention on these adjudications."