Youssef Mohamed

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Volume 89.8
Here's Your Number, Now Please Wait in Line: The Asylum Backlog, Federal Court Litigation, and Artificial Intelligence in Agency Adjudication
Youssef Mohamed
B.A. 2019, The Florida State University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

لله أولاً الحمد لله و ثانياً الحمد —I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Jennifer Nou for pushing me and this piece to ask bigger questions. I would also like to thank Lauren Dunn, Dylan Salzman, Virginia Robinson, Brian Bornhoft, and the University of Chicago Law Review editors for their patience, hard work, and insights.

At the beginning of 2022, there were 196,714 affirmative asylum claims pending, and many applicants have waited in a state of legal limbo for over five years to receive a decision on their claim. To escape the indefinite queue, some have started bringing claims of unreasonable delay under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to federal courts. Because there are groups of asylum seekers who may be especially harmed by multiyear delays in adjudication, this Comment undertakes two separate but related tasks. First, it assesses whether the avenue for relief available to advocates and asylum seekers—federal court litigation—is actually viable for its purported ends. This Comment concludes that it is not. Second, it proposes a novel agency-side adjudicative mechanism, implemented through artificial intelligence technology, to more adequately provide reliable relief to especially vulnerable asylum seekers.

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v90.4
Here’s Your Number, Now Please Wait in Line: The Asylum Backlog, Federal Court Litigation, and Artificial Intelligence in Agency Adjudication
Youssef Mohamed
B.A. 2019, The Florida State University; J.D. Candidate 2023, The University of Chicago Law School.

أولاً†الحمد†لله†و†ثانيا†الحمد†لله†—I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Jennifer Nou for pushing me and this piece to ask bigger questions. I would also like to thank Lauren Dunn, Dylan Salzman, Virginia Robinson, Brian Bornhoft, and the University of Chicago Law Review editors for their patience, hard work, and insights.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that, by the end of June 2021, there were nearly 4.4 million pending asylum applications worldwide. Many asylum seekers suffer heinous abuses in both the countries from which they flee and the countries through which they travel to reach sanctuary.