Under the new regulations, René will now have a shot of winning asylum based on the gang violence he suffered. “It doesn’t mean that they’ll get it, just simply that they’ll be eligible,” said Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration policy.

Still, the outcome of specific cases is likely to depend as much on the immigration judge they appear before as the new directives from the Justice Department, he cautioned.

Immigration judges have wide discretion in deciding asylum cases, leading to enormous disparities. At the New York Immigration Court, for example, denial rates “ranged from 95 percent down to 3 per­cent” depending on the judge, according to TRAC data.

More than half of the immigration judges currently on the bench were appointed by the Trump administration. “Whether or not this change of policy really results in a change of approval rates will partly be up to how these judges put this into practice,” Kocher said.

In Mexico and Central America, reports of the new policy quickly spread on Facebook groups dedicated to migrants. Some migrant rights activists in Central America said they were concerned that human smugglers, aided by careless reporting in the local news, could distort the move into a new selling point for people considering going to the U.S.