What needs to change about U.S. asylum laws?

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently said that some migrants “do try to game” the U.S. asylum system.

What's the evidence for that and, if true, what needs to change to stop it?

Today, On Point: U.S. asylum law and the border crisis.

Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.

Julia Preston, contributing writer for The Marshall Project.

Jean Reisz, co-director, USC Immigration Clinic, and Clinical Associate Professor of Law.

Jason De Leon, professor of anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project and author of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling.

Sam Cole, immigration judge and Executive Vice President of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Part I

Late last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was in El Paso, Texas for a U.S. Border Patrol memorial ceremony, and for what DHS calls an information gathering expedition. While there, he told CBS News something that Democrats almost never say about the U.S.'s asylum system.

MAYORKAS: The reality is that some people do indeed try to game the system that does not speak to everyone whom we encounter, but there is an element of it, and we deal with it accordingly.

CHAKRABARTI: Just days later, President Joe Biden announced a new executive order that would quote "bar migrants who crossed the southern border unlawfully from receiving asylum when the southern border is overwhelmed."

BIDEN: We must face the simple truth to protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, We must first secure the border and secure it now.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes, it's an election year, and Biden needs a border policy win. Also true, the U.S. asylum system has been overwhelmed by migrant crossings in the past several months. And also true, congressional Republicans, despite their consistent calls that migrants are gaming the U.S. asylum system, under the guidance from Donald Trump, they twice scuttled a bipartisan immigration reform package that would have increased the processing capacity of U.S. immigration courts.

But let's just take this tiny moment, this tiny sliver of political overlap, and dive straight into it, because if both Republicans, and now at least a Democratic DHS secretary, are saying that the asylum system is being gamed, what will it take to fix it?

So let's start with Muzaffar Chishti. He's senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. Muzaffar, welcome to On Point.

MUZAFFAR CHISHTI: Meghna, a delight to speak with you.

CHAKRABARTI: So first of all, I want to note that we did reach out to the Department of Homeland Security, requested an interview with Secretary Mayorkas, or a statement, whatever DHS could tell us to elaborate on what Mayorkas said.

They did not respond to us. Now, Muzaffar, I know that you can't really get into the Secretary's head. But if you were amongst his circle of advisors right now, how would you interpret the fact that he said that at least among some asylum seekers he believes that they are gaming the system?

CHISHTI: Obviously far from me to speculate what the Secretary Mayorkas meant, but you can, just on the basis of facts, surmise what he was connecting to. They're basically 3 facts, I think, which come to inform what was probably referring to. One is that, as you pointed out, in the absence of any robust legal pathways for immigrants who don't have a family or an employee connection in the country, the pathways of coming to the U.S. are extremely minimal. People from all parts of the world, for various push factors, which we can get into, are trying to get to the U.S.

And the only way they can come to the U.S. is come to the border and seek asylum.

And that has reached, at least in the last four years, a bit of a crisis proportion, both in terms of scale and the profile of immigrants who are arriving there. So that's in the absence of any of the pathways, that they seek asylum. Many, I can't say most, but many of them are simply not eligible.

Because asylum under our law is given on the basis of five narrow categories of it, and many don't fit it.

CHAKRABARTI: If I could just jump in here. The point well taken, right? And we can talk about various views on whether or not there should be more robust pathways for legal immigration. But you're saying in the absence of that, people who want to come to the United States, they see asylum as the only way to even get into the system, the processing system for immigration in this country.

But, so is that fact in and of itself the gaming of the system? Or is there more?

CHISHTI: So the gaming part comes, they apply for asylum even when they're not eligible. The wait times for adjudicating are years, right. Now four, we think that's going into six and seven. And even after they get denied, the chances of being removed from the country are minimal.

And while they're waiting for this out there, they have rights to work. Now that's hugely important for Americans. So that's what some people would say is gaming. But there are two other factors. Smugglers are clearly a huge part of this enterprise. In a way we have never seen. It's a supply chain of corrupt practices.

That's gaming. And many governments are now involved in the gaming. There are at least three, four countries in the Western Hemisphere, which allow visa free regimes for people to come from all of Asia, all of Africa, to those countries El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador comes to mind, and they use them as launching pads for coming to the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, Muzaffar, just so these are two things so that I want more detail on if you could. So you called it a supply chain of corrupt practices amongst smugglers. In detail, give me some examples. What do you mean?

CHISHTI: You would say, people coming from, let's say Africa, they would pay someone to get them a visa to go to X country, let's say Brazil.

Then they would pay someone else to get them from Brazil to south of Mexico. Then they would pay someone else to come from south of Mexico to north of Mexico. And then they would pay someone else to get them across the border. That's the kind of supply chain I am referring to.

CHAKRABARTI: Sounds very organized.

CHISHTI: It's, interestingly, it's organized, but it's not organized centrally. These are independent chains. There's not necessarily a central command sitting in Los Angeles or in Mexico City, which organized that. People have specialized in each part of the supply chain.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, do we know if, as part of that movement of people through this corrupt supply chain, as you call it, if the migrants are also getting coaching on what to do once they arrive at the border.

CHISHTI: Yes. So social media has become another longer corruption. Social media has become another huge driving force in this enterprise. People get information in real time. They are told, the New York Times did, I think, a very interesting story on Mauritanians coming and having addresses of a shelter in New York, in their rings that they wore on their fingers, that they, at each point, they are told what to do next.

And what to say if you encounter a border patrol officer. So yes, there's a certain amount of coaching, if you will say, but a certain amount certainly of information sharing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Now about those nations that you said have certain visa regimes, give me an example. Because what exactly do you mean?

Is there some sort of, I don't know, cottage industry within some of these Central American countries where those nations themselves are making some money off the weaknesses in the U.S. asylum system?

CHISHTI: We can't say this of all countries. The most celebrated case of this recently was a plane full of Indian workers flying from Dubai to Managua in Nicaragua.

It was intercepted outside Paris, because the French authorities got information that there was some trafficking going on and the plane was grounded. They found that there were a large number of kids, unaccompanied minors, and the whole plane full was on its way to Nicaragua, and they had paid an average of $50,000 to $150,000 a person to get on this flight. And the idea was that they would, the Indian nationals don't need a visa to enter Nicaragua, but they're really not going to Nicaragua. They're using Nicaragua as a launching point then to come to the United States through various countries, till they reach the border.

CHAKRABARTI: Who were they paying this vast amount of money?

CHISHTI: In this whole network of corrupt practices, they were either paying someone who found them a contact in Nicaragua. I'm really not an expert on corruption. I'm sure there are other experts you can talk to. But how organized this is, I don't know, but I think it doesn't necessarily have to be globally organized for it to become a very successful enterprise.

CHAKRABARTI: It's interesting because in the president's recent executive order regarding the border, the one from earlier this month, there is a section of that order that says the State department has imposed visa restrictions on over 250 members of the Nicaraguan government, non-governmental actors and immediate family members for their roles in supporting the Ortega Murillo regime, which The White House says is selling transit visas to migrants from within and beyond the Western Hemisphere, who ultimately wake make their way to the southern border.

Your story aligns exactly with one of the actions that the White House recently took.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay so Muzaffar, later in the show, we'll talk about the push factors as you called it. Those are being like the economic failures, the political failures, it's the conflict and instability that drives a lot of people to want to leave their home countries.

But can we also look at just changes in policy from administration to administration in the United States, as one of the things that has caused this massive surge in the number of people seeking asylum? In the past four years, as you said.

CHISHTI: Yeah, so the high watermark of big arrivals was fiscal year '22 and fiscal year '23, when we had about 2.3 million in one year and 2. 5 million encounters at the border. That is historically really very high. Really the high watermark of migrant arrivals was in December of 2023, when 300,000 people came in a month. That, you would say, since then, the numbers have gone down. We should acknowledge that.

But till 2014, I would say our border challenge was single Mexican males arriving at the border, trying to sneak their way, to seek entry in the United States, looking for a job. That, no part of the definition is true today. We have family units. We have people from all parts of the world, and they're all coming to seek asylum.

So that's really changed the nature of the challenge of the border. Now, each government has its own policies, sometimes determined by their own preferences, but also by the availability of resources. It started changing in 2014 when more Central Americans and more Central American children and then families started coming.

And the administration's policy at that time was, we will not arrest kids.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Muzaffar, just to also get some facts here so that we have a common basis of understanding.

I can't remember if you said this earlier, but do we know, do we have data on roughly how, what percentage of people who seek asylum or who apply for asylum in the United States end up actually receiving it?

CHISHTI: That's a very interesting and complicated question. And it's become complicated more recently, because all asylum cases that are submitted to courts are not actually adjudicated.

And this is a more recent phenomenon. Historically, I would tell you that the asylum raid denials and approvals are somewhere in the range of 48% to 52%. Or 45% to 55%, 55 denials 45 that's been true for but pretty close to 20 years. That's actually true, even for last year, about only 30% of cases that were actually adjudicated by the immigration judges, where 16% were denied, 14% were approved. So that's consistent with that. The difference now is that given the huge backlog as the immigration codes, majority of the cases, in this case, 70% of the cases in the last two years, have just been taken off the caseload.

They have either been closed or they have been dismissed. Of the 30% that are actually decided on the merits, the split is 60/40. So that's consistent, but what's changed now is that using enforcement priorities, the government and the judges are taking most cases off the decision docket.

CHAKRABARTI: And if 70% are closed or dismissed, and many of those, I suppose those migrants are in the United States when that decision takes place, about their case, what happens to them?

CHISHTI: So many of them stay eligible to actually apply for asylum with the United States Immigration Service. That's your thing.

We're reshuffling the deck, is that, yeah, we'll dismiss, but you still remain eligible to apply for asylum if you want to, before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Many of them will apply, many of them won't. I should also note, that for the first time in a long time, we are finding large number of people who don't show up for the hearings.

CHAKRABARTI: How many? Or what's the percentage if we know?

CHISHTI: We don't know, but it's pretty close to 60%, it may be inching towards 60%.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. And that's quite a change, right? Because beforehand, the vast majority of people came, showed up.

CHISHTI: And I think part of it is we believe that people just don't have lawyers, because of the scale of the numbers now, a lot of people do not have representation.

So if you don't have representation, then you don't show up. And that's now become a big challenge for service providers and for us as a country, in general.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. But if people don't show up, and I just want to note, as you said, this is quite a change, right? In terms of the increasing percentage of people who aren't coming.

For their court dates.

CHISHTI: Let me just correct you. I just looked at all of the removal orders issued by last year 69% were on absentia removals.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, absentia from court. Okay. So the removal orders have been issued for those folks. And so therefore, until they are deported, they are in the United States in a continuing undocumented status.

But that does that mean that, from my understanding, many people who are seeking asylum and awaiting their court dates, they are in fact given the right to work in order to support themselves. Does that mean that their work permits persist?

CHISHTI: Exactly. That's a good question.

If your case is dismissed or you're removed, whether by an adjudication or by absentia, your eligibility for employment goes away.

CHAKRABARTI: It goes away. Okay. But of course, that doesn't stop employers from hiring people who are undocumented. Okay, so ... I really appreciate this, because there's so many competing claims about what percentage of migrants show up for their asylum hearings.

What percentage do not, this very interesting note that you made about the increase in number of cases that are simply not adjudicated anymore. That says a lot, but it seems to all point to the fact that, as you said earlier, the whole asylum system, the immigration courts that are handling these cases, are thoroughly overwhelmed.

And that in order to speed up processing for, what, the 3 million cases that are in the queue, it would take a major investment.

CHAKRABARTI: Exactly. So the crisis, you could say, at the border is actually an asylum crisis, that the country is facing an asylum. And let me just be clarified for all your listeners.

We have to defend asylum as a value. Our country was founded on the principle of asylum, and we are leaders in the world in telling other countries that they should keep their asylum doors open. So it's very important for us in the country to keep to that value preserved. So therefore, anything that attacks that value, we have to therefore fight against. Because otherwise we'll lose the consensus for asylum in the country. So we believe that the way to address this crisis, as we just finished talking, a huge part of this lies in the backlogged immigration code system. There are 3.7 million cases in the immigration court system.

If you look at what it was in just 10 years ago, that was like half a million. So we have argued that the way to solve our problem is to have asylum determinations done fairly and quickly, efficiency and fairness. And the way to achieve that is not to send any more new cases from the border to this backlogged immigration cases, but to asylum officers who are trained professionals at the U.S. Citizens Immigration Service, who are country experts. And those decisions can be made in months, as against years. And then people would get their decision in months, and people who don't qualify would be removed. And people who really qualified would get it quickly.

CHAKRABARTI: Wait, can you clarify something?

You said you would not, you recommend not letting migrants cross the border, but having their, I just want to be sure, having their cases be heard by these country experts, as you said at the border? Clarify.

CHISHTI: So we would have two steps in this. As we have under the present law, is that someone who arrives at the border facility, they are screened by an asylum officer, for what we call the credible fear determination?

CHAKRABARTI: Correct.

CHISHTI: ... If they pass their credible fear determination, then they are sent to, in fear of the country, Los Angeles or Long Island, there, they have to go to a judge. We are saying that instead of going to a judge, they should be sent to an asylum officer in those cities and those asylum officers should make the final determination, and that can be done in months ... years.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So Muzaffar, stand by for just a second because I just want to get the view very briefly of someone who has sat at the bench in these immigration courts. This is Sam Cole. He's based in Chicago. He is an immigration judge, and he serves as executive vice president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Now he spoke to us in the capacity as executive vice president of the judge's union. He wanted to be clear he is not representing an official stance from the Department of Justice. Because he's a judge. Now, he told us, of course, that the immigration system is not working right now, and from his perspective as a judge, here are some of the problems that he sees.

SAM COLE: Immigration court procedures and the politics of immigration court are constantly intertwined, right? So politics gets in the way of adjudicating cases, because every administration, or sometimes multiple times during administration, there are changes in policies, but which cases should be here first? Who, should new cases jump to the front of the line, which cases jump at the front of the line? How do we handle new arrivals versus people who have already been here a couple of years, who gets priority? Which type of cases should we get to get priority, are they cases with individual males crossing the border, or are they family unit cases, we call it docket shuffling? All this docket shuffling creates delay. And it also creates confusion.

CHAKRABARTI: That's immigration judge Sam Cole. I'd like to bring Julia Preston into the conversation now. She's a contributing writer for the Marshall Project. She covered immigration for the New York Times for a decade. And prior to that, she was a member of the Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on international affairs.

Julia Preston, welcome to On Point.

JULIA PRESTON: Hi Meghna, thank you so much for inviting me.

CHAKRABARTI: And I appreciate your patience as we went through some of the numbers with Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute. I want to get your impression, first of all, about some practical things that the Biden administration recently decided, with that executive order, right?

Because as I quoted earlier, the executive order says migrants seeking asylum will not be able to actually cross the border, when Border officials are overwhelmed with the numbers, that their asylum process will have to remain in Mexico for some time. Now that has some echoes to policies that were put in place in the Trump administration.

So just your quick thoughts on that, that we have to have taken such extreme measures, right now, in order to cope with this overwhelmed system.

PRESTON: I think that this measure is similar in the sense that what the Trump administration wanted to do and eventually succeeded in doing is really shut down access to the asylum system across the southwest border.

This policy is significantly different, in the sense that in addition to shutting down access to asylum. In between the official border points of entry, when there is a very high volume of migrants coming to the border to cross unlawfully, the Biden administration has also opened up really significant legal pathways for asylum seekers to come across the border. That involves using a, believe it or not, an app, called CBP One, where you can make an appointment to come to an official entry point along the border. We're talking about San Diego or Laredo or Brownsville, these big places, El Paso, these big places where there's a lot of traffic coming back and forth across the border.

And if you have an appointment, you can gain admission and be released into the United States to pursue an asylum claim. And there are also other significant legal pathways that the Biden administration has opened that the Trump administration never did anything like that.

However, when there's a high volume of migrants coming to try and cross between the ports of entry, as is the case right now, basically, the Biden administration has just shut down the border for asylum claims from those people, and is issuing notices to them that they will be deported. They are being deported, and they will not be able to return for at least five years to the United States.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to come back to the between ports of entry issue in just a second, but let's just drive to something that I think is central in many people's minds when they think about this asylum system crisis in the United States right now.

And that is something that that Muzaffar actually said a little while ago, that many people, or a significant percentage of people who request asylum in the United States, because they know they have no other way of getting in the country. They're using the asylum system as this parallel immigration system.

And therefore, the point is these are folks who should, who will not get approved for asylum, and they should never even be able to request it to begin with. Julia, I think that makes a lot of Americans think, why are we even having these folks go through the adjudication process?

Whether it takes one year, or five years couldn't we clear the backlog by just, in that credible fear interview that they do in the beginning, just say, this is not credible. You're clearly here for economic or other reasons. But you cannot have asylum.

PRESTON: I would build a little bit on Muzaffar's very comprehensive description of the situation, to just point out that what the migrants are doing is actually consistent with American law.

I don't think that in most cases, the vast majority of cases, they are thinking that they, or understanding that they are, as Secretary Mayorkas put it, gaming the system. I would put the focus of the gaming on the smugglers who are operating, especially in Northern Mexico, and just add a little bit of detail to that, to Muzaffar's description, to say that this has become an incredibly dangerous smuggling. And hugely lucrative smuggling operation across Mexico, which is significantly dominated by some of the most violent and vicious narcotics cartels that have operated in Mexico for many years.

And increasingly, these organizations are not providing a service to these migrants as they're crossing, as much as they're just engaging in a kind of an extortion racket. So you have to get, you have to pay money, at each point across the way, especially in Mexico, in order to get to the border.

The nature of the asylum system is that it is explicitly stated in American, current American law that a person can express a fear of return to their home country, and state a claim that they would like to seek asylum wherever they crossed the border, whether or not it was at a legal port of entry or in between the ports of entry and whether or not they are undocumented or have a legal travel document.

So that's stated in law, and what the smugglers have figured out is that if you can get the migrants, say to the bank of the Rio Grande River, and float them across, there's zero risk to the smuggler. Never comes into the United States, and they advise the migrants to turn themselves into the border patrol, which is legal for them to do.

And that begins the asylum process. So this massive gaming of the system, I would attribute to no small degree to the huge smuggling business that has developed in Mexico.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: In a minute or two, we're going to hear the story of someone who went through the legal system, the legal asylum system, as it currently exists in this country.

But before I do that, Muzaffar, there's a question I must return to with you, because you had said earlier that people have internalized this understanding, that if they couldn't get into the U.S. in any other way, any other legal pathway, asylum is the way to at least seek to enter that process.

That's why others have called it the parallel immigration system. Now, embedded in that idea is, depending on your point of view, that the U.S., legal pathways to residency in the United States are inadequate. However, I think there's a lot of pushback to that, right?

Because we do have employment visas. We do have student visas. And specifically, as you said, family relationship is a major legal way for people to come into this country. I think a lot of Americans, across the board, would say, Why do we need any other pathways for people who legitimately know they wouldn't even qualify for asylum?

CHISHTI: The reason we need it, because we have an immigration selection system that's based on a 1952 architecture and has been tinkered with only two or three times since, the last time in 1990. Just imagine how many things, how many times we have changed our interest rates since then, but we don't change the level of migration for 35 years.

That doesn't make sense, even to a Trump supporter. Under our present system, two thirds of the green cards are allotted to family members. If you're coming on an employment based system, and if you're coming for the relatively unskilled jobs, the green card is available like $10,000. That is not a pathway for people who are coming to do important jobs in our country, from health care, elder care, child care, to farming and to working in restaurants.

We have no pathway. So that's one of the crisis of our immigration. I do think that we have twin crisis. We actually have a labor market crisis, for which we need immigration reform. But Congress has no appetite for that, as long as they don't see the other crisis, which is the border crisis under control.

So these are twin crisis in my mind and intertwined.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Trying to get a more sensible way for legal, low skilled labor, point well taken. So that would be taking care of the economic migrant portion here. ... So Julia, let me turn to you about another portion of people who are seeking asylum in the United States.

There are many folks, because of gang violence, as you talked about, and the sort of narco state or the narcotics trade across the Western Hemisphere, who fear for their safety. Seek asylum in the United States, but not explicitly, because they're under persecution from their government, right?

But it's gang violence they fear. Again, as brutal as it might sound, there are many Americans who would say that is not the intent of political asylum. And so therefore, de facto, these people should not be allowed to enter the asylum system in the United States.

PRESTON: It's certainly true that the system, the way, the standards in the system, the way they are currently devised, are focused on threats and displacement that took place in the wake of World War II and in the wake of the Vietnam War. And really have not been updated since then for the new types of crises that we face in the world. So the asylum law currently is based on the notion of someone who is fleeing persecution for these five categories: race, nationality, political belief, religious belief, and something called membership in a particular social group.

And one of the changes that one would like to see is for Congress to update the asylum standards, to include these threats from what you might call a non-state actor or gang violence. Codify the protections for women who are fleeing from sexual violence and domestic abuse.

These are advances that have been made through litigation, but they've never been codified into law. One of the ways that would, I think, ease the pressure on the system, is if the actual legal standards were updated to include some of the situations that are extremely dangerous for people today, but are not coming from persecution by governments.

CHAKRABARTI: I suppose, Julia, the reason why I made that point is there are many Americans who just reject what you just said and said, why should we update these standards? It's not America's problem that there's gang violence in villages in Honduras, for example.

PRESTON: In the specific case of Central America, the fact that they have a plague of gang violence is directly related to policies of deportation of gang members from Salvadoran gang members back to El Salvador and back to Central America in the 1980s and 1990s.

In a sense, we do have a responsibility for that situation because we did, to a very large and significant extent, we are responsible, our policies and our practices, were responsible for creating it in the first place.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, point well taken. I don't dispute that. But again, the question must be asked, and what responsibility do the actual elected governments in those countries have?

PRESTON: And I would also say, I'm not sure that you're right, actually, about American opinion. I think by and large, you wouldn't know it from the conversation that we've been having recently in political terms. But by and large, people, Americans are very welcoming of refugees. And for example, just to clarify, in addition to the asylum system was a kind of an afterthought of the larger refugee legislation that the United States adopted in 1980.

And the focus of the refugee system is for people who are outside of the country and are vetted and approved before they come to the United States. Asylum was a kind of an afterthought that was created on a case-by-case basis, in case, in the unlikely event that someone would show up and cross the border and be already in the country and ask for asylum.

And the Biden administration, for example, seems to be on target to restore the refugee resettlement process to 125,000 refugees, which is the highest, a very high number of refugee resettlement. And they seem to be on track to do that this year.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

PRESTON: And the Ukrainian situation, many of the Afghans, people, Americans have stepped up consistently to welcome people who are fleeing from this type of violence, especially when there's a situation like Ukraine, where global security is threatened by what Vladimir Putin has imposed on Ukraine.

The Afghans who supported U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Americans have not only supported in a bipartisan way, the refugee programs, but under the Biden administration, private citizens have stepped up to resettle refugees coming.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, actually, Julia, I'm really glad that you highlighted that because it's absolutely true.

I would say, though, that perhaps let's say, in media discussions or even just discussions between neighbors and friends in America, a lot of people make a distinction between refugees and people seeking asylum in the United States. But, I got us off track here a little bit and I do apologize. 'Cause I want to get back to, how do we fix the problem right now in the United States?

And in order to do that, just quickly want to use an example of someone who has been through recently the asylum system in the United States. Now we spoke with Jean Reisz, she's an associate professor of law at the University of Southern California and co-director of the USC Gould Center School of law immigration clinic, and she represents clients who are seeking asylum.

Now, one of her clients is a woman whom we'll call Maria.

JEAN REISZ: We met her at location in Tijuana. It was basically a safe house for gay women. And this is just different organizations were finding housing for people.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, Maria is Honduran, and in 2018, when Jean Reisz met her, Maria was part of a program called metering.

Migrants arriving at the U.S. Mexico border would not be allowed to cross north. Instead, Mexican officials added their name to a list, migrants were given a number, and months later, that number would come up for processing.

REISZ: She went and got her number and waited in Tijuana. I believe it was for about six months and her number was called and then so she was able to go to the port of entry and present herself to immigration officials and say, I'd like to seek asylum.

I'm afraid to return home.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, that happened in what's called the Credible Fear interview that you've heard about already in this hour. Maria told U.S. officials that she was gay, and that if she stayed in her Honduran hometown, she could be killed.

REISZ: She became a target, and she had various rapes, and was told things like, We're gonna fix you, we're gonna make you like men, this is how a woman should behave.

And she started getting death threats, and there were other individuals who were gay in her area where she lived, her kind of colonia, and a couple were killed, so she fled because she believed that she was going to be killed.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria fled by joining a caravan of migrants moving north. She didn't have the money to pay the smugglers we've been talking about, and she believed the caravan offered safety in numbers.

Now, following that credible fear interview, Maria was detained in San Diego but then quickly released. Jean Reisz says being released from detention actually worked against Maria, since those in detention often have their cases heard more quickly. Maria's case did not come to court until 2023, almost five years later.

Because everything had slowed down due to the pandemic. Now, as you've heard, U.S. law grants asylum on five basic grounds. Severe harm or threat of harm due to a person's race, religion, political beliefs, nationality, or membership in a particular social group. And Jean Reisz says Maria fell into that last group.

REISZ: The definition of a particular social group is that you have this immutable characteristic, so something you can't change or shouldn't have to change about yourself. You're socially distinct within society, so people in your society would perceive you as being part of that group. So if you're a gay woman, people in society perceive you as a gay woman.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria did show up in court on the day of her hearing, and Reisz says in order to convince the judge, she had to recount in detail the violence she'd experienced in Honduras.

REISZ: The burden of proof is on her, because she's applying for asylum, so she has to provide all the evidence to show that she was persecuted, faces persecution on account of a protected group by someone the government's unable or unwilling to protect her from, or by the government themselves.

So she testifies to everything that happened to her. And to the harm and the trauma, because you have to show it's a severe harm. So she had to testify to the rapes. She had to testify to what was said to her. Any inconsistencies, any answers that are non-responsive. If her demeanor is off, all of those things can be used to deny her asylum.

CHAKRABARTI: Now Jean Reisz says her team also provided additional evidence, like State Department and Human Rights reports, to help prove that Maria did need protection under U.S. asylum laws, and the evidence was very strong. Maria was granted asylum, but again it took basically, five and a half years. So Muzaffar, practically speaking, we've just got about a minute or so left.

What would it take to clear this backlog so that people wouldn't have to wait five and a half years?

CHISHTI: I'll repeat my recommendation, but Julia is quite aware of. I think the backlog in the immigration course is going to increase. 3.7 million backlog cases, therefore, it's madness to add to that backlog.

The only way to bring some sanity in this system is to send all new cases. We're not saying migrate all the existing, all new cases on the border, not immigration judges, but asylum officers, who we believe are better trained, they're more country experts, and they can decide cases in months, as against years.

So if we can complete a case, including appeals, within one year of someone submitting asylum, I think we'll be on a good footing.

CHAKRABARTI: I see.

CHISHTI: That's the kind of reform we need.

CHAKRABARTI: Julia, we have 30 seconds left though, it doesn't seem that there's any will in Washington to do this. Because as I mentioned earlier, twice now, a bipartisan bill has been scuttled by Republicans.

It seems like they've taken a measure that says for as long as the system is broken, we politically benefit from that. And then, Democrats can't seem to get their act together to overwhelm Republican resistance. ... Do you believe any change could be on the horizon?

PRESTON: I'm afraid that the crackdown, the Biden administration, in terms of the border, the crackdown is the way that the Biden administration is going, but behind the scenes, they are moving slowly.

With limited resources to create this asylum officer adjudication system, closer to the border, faster. That's definitely the way to go. There needs to be attorneys involved with that. So there's clearly a due process. There needs to be a resettlement system. So that people can be cooperation with NGOs and to resettle people.