Two asylum seekers cross the southern border six months apart. Same country, same persecution, same statute. A clerk neither of them has ever met routes one to the regular docket and the other to an expedited docket. One gets heard in eight months. The other is waiting until 2028. That single routing decision is now six years of difference.

In the first of a two-part deep dive on immigration adjudication, Gwen and Marc walk through the system that will decide both of their cases:

• 3.2 million pending cases, 2.3 million of them asylum, divided among roughly 700 immigration judges — about 3,200 cases per judge, each requiring hours of fact-intensive testimony through interpreters about events in another country
• The particular social group doctrine — the single most contested category in asylum law, which has flipped four tim ...