Japa: 1,300 Nigerians secure US asylum

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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, 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. Punch