Nicholas Nehamas

Right.

So the process of hearing all those claims takes a really long time.

Yeah, and the administration did take a series of drastic steps to stop illegal immigration.

You had family separation, travel bans.

Right, right.

But when it came to the immigration courts, they actually really didn't change all that much about how they were operating.

There were some shifts, but they were kind of standard for a Republican administration, you know, being more critical about who should get asylum.

And for Judge DeAndre, that made a lot of sense to her.

She described herself to me as having a conservative judicial philosophy.

And so how did that change when Joe Biden took office?

But then Trump leaves office, Biden comes in, and things totally change.

The emphasis was much more on interpreting the law to grant asylum to people who were asking for it.

Right.

So, I mean, it sounds like there was a pressure from above to grant asylum.

What did that soft pressure look like?

Like, what's an example of soft pressure?

How did you feel it?

And so, you know, that soft pressure that Judge DeAndre describes, it does actually seem to bear out in the numbers because we ran a data analysis of all asylum claims during this time.

And what we found is that asylum was being granted at a much higher rate during Biden than it had been during Trump won.

Under Trump won, maybe one in three people were getting asylum.