When I was at Immigration & Naturalization, the "asylum office" in Chicago had a record of accepting 8% of all applicants for asylum, rejecting 92% of them.
But then, of those who filed judicial appeals (which is apart from the process), at a great cost of money and time to themselves, upon judicial review, 91% of those applicants for asylum, who had been rejected by the bureaucrats, were accepted.
This is a travesty.
The laws of immigration are essentially straightforward and clear; probably even an 8th-graduate can understand them. It is easy, to go up-and-down the list, figuring if this thing applies, and this other thing does not--a computer can do it.
So why do we have all these $75,000+ per year asylum examiners, if a computer could do it--and a computer, if instructed, WOULD do it.
As an aside, I am familiar with cases such as yours; the Lincoln (Nebraska) office of Immigration & Naturalization, when I left there in 1997, had over 8,000,000--I repeat that, and this is a SMALL office; 8,000,000--documents that were not matched with files.
These were not unidentifiable pieces of paper; it was just that there was no interest in physically getting them with their proper files.
For some time I've thought the INS/ICE would be much better off if they transitioned to electronic filing, as the IRS has been doing rather successfully.
It's unbelieveable to walk into an adjudication office and see files stacked 2 and 3 feet high, and knowing the kind of blood and sweat that petitioners put into compiling those files. As my wife's file was magically pulled almost right off the top (it was her naturalization approval and the last step in a very tediour process), I pitied those poor people whose files were at the bottom.
As for the asylees, it is the direct fault of Congress and nothing or no one else that there's such unmitigated confusion over who does and does not have final jurisdiction over immigration cases.
Immigration to the USA is not a "legal right," and has only been considered so in the last 25 years.