Legitimized Refugees investigates the question of how the Swedish migration bureaucracy’s highest legal instance, the Migration Court of Appeal, legitimizes decisions that affect the lives of asylum seekers. Based on critical discourse analysis of precedents and informed by semi-structured interviews with migration court judges, the study illustrates the textual construction of last-instance decisions that concern families with children; class, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality; and the policy of ‘regulated immigration’. Thus, it challenges the institutionalized power imbalance that is built into the asylum system.