Domain Atlas

Immigration & asylum AI

Immigration and asylum are among the highest-stakes decisions a state makes about a person — asylum, removal, detention — so the reliability of any AI signal and the weight it is given matter more here than almost anywhere, and the person affected is typically least able to see or contest the AI. Two patterns anchor the governance. In credibility assessment, a federal asylum agency uses dialect-recognition AI to estimate an applicant's origin from a speech sample; the tool is imprecise (government-reported recognition around 80 percent for one language, and linguists judge separating some varieties close to hopeless) and the agency's own caseworkers call it a rough compass, too imprecise to resolve hard cases. Used honestly as one clue among several it is defensible; the documented risk is that an imprecise output acquires more authority than its accuracy supports, in a determination where the state's tool is set against the applicant's own account. In enforcement triage, an algorithm identifies and recommends people for immigration actions, and a design detail uncovered through freedom-of-information litigation makes the governance concrete: officials had to justify rejecting a recommendation but not accepting one — an asymmetric override that builds a rubber-stamping incentive into the workflow, so the human in the loop is nominal rather than real. Running under both is a severed correction loop on the applicant's side: applicants are frequently not told AI is used, so the person with the most at stake and the most knowledge of the truth cannot contest the signal used to decide their case. The Lab networks model only the deploying government body — its model or triage tool, the caseworkers and officers who act on its outputs, and its case records; the applicants being decided sit outside the dynamics, no asylum or enforcement outcome is computed on any diagram, and reliability, override-design, and disclosure findings are recorded external facts (reports, fieldwork, FOI disclosures), never adjudications of any individual case.