Thread by @ReichlinMelnick

Here's a hard fact for you, @SpoxDHS; every single claim in your tweet is deeply misleading. I'm going to focus on your big whopper; that 90% of asylum-seekers do not "qualify" for asylum! That's just not true. I'll show you why, using only data from the government itself.

https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/1093252799691980803

Here's what we know about the caravan members and their asylum "qualifications."

In April, when the first caravan arrived, USCIS Asylum Officers determined that 93% of caravan members who asked for asylum had a credible fear of persecution.
buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfo…

What does it mean to have a "credible fear" of persecution? Well, under US law, that means that an Asylum Officer determined that there is a "a significant possibility" that a person could win asylum. This translates to about at least a 10% chance of winning asylum.

What this means is that the caravans are overwhelmingly full of people who pass the initial threshold test for asylum. But what about once they apply for asylum? Again, despite your claim, large numbers of them win asylum! Here's what immigration court records show.

Most caravan members are Central American.

In FY 2018, 31.1% of Salvadorans won asylum or were permitted to stay in the US, compared to 24.9% of Guatemalans and 23.9% of Hondurans.

Over 20,000 people from those countries won asylum last year.

trac.syr.edu/immigration/re…

That said, the most caravan members will not have had any hearing on an asylum application yet, if they were released from detention. The average time for an non-detained case is 718 days. We won't know the ultimate asylum eligibility of most caravan members for YEARS.

Last year, the DHS Office of Immigration Statistics looked at the case outcomes through FY 2017 for all the people who came to the border in 2014. By the end of FY 2017, a full 51% were still in removal proceedings!
dhs.gov/sites/default/…

As a result, most caravan members are still literally years away from a final decision on their asylum case. If they had a claim denied so far it was likely because they were unrepresented and detained. And that makes a MASSIVE difference in win rate. trac.syr.edu/immigration/re…

As the last chart shows, 95.9% of asylum-seekers from El Salvador lost asylum if they didn't have a lawyer. But that dropped to 73.1% if they had an attorney. That's because, as we've documented @immcouncil , access to a lawyer is incredibly important. americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/acces…

In addition, I would be incredibly remiss not to mention the fact that many people have a genuine and real fear of harm... but that harm might not rise to the level of "persecution" under asylum law. People can lose asylum even when a judge agrees they'll be killed upon return.

Last year, Jeff Sessions made it even harder to win asylum, by rewriting binding case law and making it substantially harder for people who fled abusive relationships in countries where the government was unwilling or unable to protect them to win asylum. immigrationimpact.com/2018/06/13/asy…

So, to sum up for @SpoxDHS:

1. The vast majority of caravan members pass the first threshold to qualify for asylum.
2. Way more than 10% of Central Americans win asylum or obtain another protection.
3. We still don't have good data on how many will ultimately win their case.

A brief correction to one of the above tweets, about 51% of asylum-seekers still in proceedings. I tweeted a chart which included some individuals who had not actually been placed in removal proceedings (for various complicated reasons). Here's the chart I should have posted.

One last thing for @SpoxDHS, in regards to your last tweet.

There is a group at the border "seeking to side-step the legal process." It's you, which is why we, along with @splcenter & @theCCR, sued you for unlawfully turning away asylum-seekers.

https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/1093252800899940355