Last year, judges across the country denied 65 percent of asylum applications. But that figure obscures significant disparities between courts, and even among judges within the same court. In 2008, for example, a Government Accountability Office study found that asylum seekers in Atlanta were 15 times more likely to be denied asylum than in San Francisco, and eight times more likely than in New York City. A follow-up study, in 2016, reported that little had changed. And a 2017 investigation by Reuters, which analyzed more than 370,000 immigration court cases across the country, concluded that whether a person is deported or not “depends largely on who hears the case, and where.” One attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, speaking to the Christian Science Monitor in April, was more blunt: “Your judge is your destiny.”