Department of Homeland Security officials might have faked data that shows a surge in Russian citizens seeking asylum in the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s team suggested Thursday.
“We do not know how true they (these statistics) are,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday, per TASS, a state-run outlet. “It is hardly possible to trust them off-hand.”
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Russian asylum requests spiked to a post-Cold War high, with 2,664 people applying for the status in 2017, according to U.S. Customs and Immigration Services data. The figures were reported by Radio Liberty, a U.S. government funded outlet, which obtained the information through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“The 2017 figure is more than double the number of first-time applications by Russians since 2012, when Putin was elected to a third presidential term after serving four years as prime minister,” Radio Liberty noted. “It also eclipsed the previous high according to USCIS data for post-Soviet Russia, set in 1994 with 2,127 first-time asylum applications by Russians.”
Peskov urged reporters not to read much into the report.
“In the sea of falsehoods one should be very cautious about interpreting any such figures,” he said.
Lawyers handling the asylum applications say that many of the requests are driven by government-backed homophobia, as well as a crackdown on political dissidents.
“[Some asylum applicants are] getting shaken down on their business dealings merely because they are partisan and anti-Putin, and funding or being involved in another political party,” Andrew Johnson, an attorney in New York, said.
One day after Radio Liberty published its report, a state-owned polling company reported that Russian happiness has reached a record-high.
“The level of happiness the Russians have been showing over the past twelve months is the highest over the entire history of opinion polls in this country,” the All-Russia Center for Public Opinion Research announced Thursday. “The latest poll shows that 83 percent Russians think they are lucky people on the whole.”
