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Nigerians in asylum in the United States
No fewer than 1,372 Nigerians have secured asylum in the United States of America over the last three years.
This is contained in new case-completion data published by the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
According to findings by Saturday PUNCH, US judges granted protection to 475 Nigerians in 2022, 514 in 2023 and 383 in 2024, revealing a 25-per cent decline from 2023 and 2024 alone.
Among the 475 in 2022 were 12-year-old Nigerian chess prodigy, Tani Adewumi, whose family fled Boko Haram threats and secured asylum in New York in late 2022 after a legal battle that began in a Manhattan homeless shelter.
In 2024, LGBTQ activist and memoirist, Edafe Okporo, won protection after documenting life-threatening violence at home.
In that period, however, at least 1,534 Nigerians failed to convince the bench of their asylum claims.
A total of 603, 666 and 265 claims were denied in 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively, marking a 56-per-cent fall from the 2022 rejection mark.
Nigerian applicants logged 1,534 rejections, alongside 68 abandonments and 552 cases the courts marked “not adjudicated” in 2022, plus smaller numbers of procedural closures in 2023 and 2024.
The EOIR report is published annually on the US Department of Justice’s “Asylum Decisions by Nationality” portal. It lists every country that registered at least a handful of cases.
In Africa, details show that Nigerians logged the most asylum claims in the US in 2022 and 2023.
But that changed in 2024 as 527 Cameroonians sought cover in 2024, followed by 383 Nigerians and 291 Ethiopians.
Others are Ghana (238), Egypt (203), Eritrea (193), Uganda (86), Senegal (99) and Sudan (42). Closer observations show that African claims still account for a relatively small slice of the U.S. asylum applications, which are dominated by Latin American and Eurasian cases.
Globally, Russian nationals gained the most asylum protection in 2024 with 3,605 grants, a surge U.S. officials attribute to draft evasion and dissident cases sparked by the Ukraine war.
China recorded 2,998 grants as more dissidents flee the communist regime, just as Venezuela recorded 2,656 and Nicaragua 2,000.
U.S. immigration judges also granted protection to 1,684 Salvadorans, 1,624 Hondurans, 1,592 Guatemalans, 1,007 Cubans and 751 Mexicans.
On the denial side, Mexicans recorded the highest rejections with 3,910 denials, followed by China with 903, El Salvador with 2,880, Ecuador with 2,774 and Peru with 2,424.
Under U.S. law, asylum is governed by section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Anyone physically present in the United States may request asylum if they can prove a “well-founded fear” on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
However, criminal convictions, one-year filing deadlines and the notion of “firm resettlement” can all ruin asylum claims before they reach a hearing. The system operates on two tracks: those who apply affirmatively through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and those who assert a “defensive” claim after being placed in removal.
Success depends on corroborating documents, credible testimony and, increasingly, on securing scarce legal counsel. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services first vets “affirmative” cases; if rejected, they are rerouted to EOIR’s immigration courts, where the government’s trial attorneys can still oppose release. “Defensive” claims arise when migrants are already in removal proceedings, the EOIR says.
In his first tenure (2017 – 2021), President Donald Trump reviewed these conditions with policy tools such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, otherwise known as “Remain in Mexico” and a third-country transit bar that disqualified most applicants who passed through another country before reaching the U.S. border.
Although Trump’s rules were partly dismantled or narrowed under President Joe Biden, a new Circumvention of Lawful Pathways regulation means many arrivals must now secure an appointment through the Customs and Border Protection’s One mobile app or prove they sought refuge elsewhere en route—which was criticised for its close semblance with the Trump-era playbook.
The EOIR notes that case flow and court staffing can shift outcomes from one fiscal cycle to the next. This is as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled 902 Nigerian nationals since the start of fiscal year 2019, according to data from the agency’s 2024 Annual Report. (Saturday PUNCH)
