Holland & Knight Team Secures Rare Asylum Grant as Approval Rates Hit Historic Low

Just days before Christmas, Holland & Knight partner Justin Cohen and associate Morgan Delabar stood before an immigration judge to plead for asylum for a Honduran mother and her youngest son.

The family had fled Honduras claiming gang members murdered the family’s patriarch, shot the couple’s oldest son in the head and later beat him and set him on fire — all in an effort to seize the family’s land. 

For Cohen and Delabar, whose practices focus on patent and trademark litigation, the pro bono case bore little resemblance to their day-to-day work. The stakes were immeasurably higher, and the procedural landscape is the most challenging asylum lawyers have faced in decades. 

Under the second Trump administration, asylum grants have plunged even more sharply than during the president’s first term, when the grant rate fell to 29 percent in fiscal year 2020, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research arm of the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

This year, asylum grants have reached their lowest level since 2009. An investigation by The New York Times published in April revealed that immigration judges granted just 7 percent of asylum applications in February, placing Cohen and Delabar among a small group of attorneys nationwide who have secured asylum victories in an increasingly inhospitable environment. 

“Looking back, we are incredibly thankful that our immigration judge fully considered our clients’ circumstances and correctly applied the law,” Cohen told The Texas Lawbook.