On Tuesday, a Seattle-based federal judge declined to throw out a lawsuit introduced on behalf of immigrants who may not have been informed of the one-year deadline in the US and want to apply for asylum. The number of such immigrants could be in the tens of thousands.
The case applies to immigrants who have expressed fears of persecution if sent home to their own countries, or whose fears have already been found credible by the authorities. Although they were then released from immigration detention, their lawyers say that the immigrants were not told they only had a year to make applications. The Department of Homeland Security claims they could still ask permission from an immigration judge to apply, even if they had missed the deadline. But US District Judge, Ricardo S Martinez, dismissed the argument on Tuesday.
Martinez says that the plaintiffs claim they now need to find an immigration judge who will believe their delayed filings were justified by extraordinary or changed circumstances. This means that they have lost their statutory right to apply for asylum in the US.
The lawsuit argues that with no standard procedure for asylum applications in the US, severe backlogs in the nation’s immigration system mean that asylum seekers often do not get scheduled court appearances until over 12 months after their arrival. They often only learn of the one-year deadline after it has passed.