For asylum seekers in Immigration Court, the Individual Hearing is where they tell their story to the judge and get a decision. Even with a kind Immigration Judge (IJ) and a reasonable DHS Attorney (prosecutor), testifying in court can be intimidating and stressful. Here, we’ll talk about the Individual Hearing and what is expected from respondents (non-citizens seeking protection) and witnesses.
Jimmy Carter turns 100 years old today. Mr. Carter was President from 1977 to 1981. During those years, he created the modern asylum system when he signed the Refugee Act of 1980, oversaw the admission of Cubans and Haitians during the Mariel Boatlift, assisted refugees from South Vietnam, which had recently fallen to the Communist North, and worked to increase security along the U.S.-Mexico border. During his long post-presidency, Mr. Carter has championed human rights and democracy, advocated for peace, improved healthcare, fought disease, promoted low-cost housing, and engaged in various diplomatic missions for the U.S. government. Among his many honors, Mr. Carter received the Noble Peace Prize in 2002.
On the occasion of the former President’s 100th birthday, I thought it would be appropriate to look back at his record on immigration, and see how his contributions continue to impact asylum seekers and other migrants more than four decades after he left office. (more…)
There was a time during the good old days of the Obama Administration when the Asylum Office would release quarterly statistics and even hold in-person stakeholder meetings where advocates could talk to the Asylum Office leadership. The Trump Administration worked hard to end transparency in government, and the pandemic didn’t help. As a result, the meetings and quarterly data disappeared. I had hoped that the Biden Administration would revive these practices, but that was not to be.
So now-a-days, we have to get our data where we can. This isn’t easy, but recently–as a result of my involvement in some Congressional lobbying efforts–I came across information about the Asylum Office that I thought I would share here. (more…)
There’s a scene in the iconic 1994 movie Clerks where Dante Hicks says to his friend and fellow slacker Randall Graves: “You hate people!” Randall responds, “Yes, but I love social gatherings–isn’t it ironic?” This is basically the opposite of my feelings towards the Asylum Office. The people are (mostly) great, but the organization is a disaster. Interviews are routinely delayed for years on end, decisions are delayed for months or years after that. The Asylum Offices rarely give sufficient notice before the interview, so there is little time to prepare, and the interviews themselves are often inefficient and interminably long.
In a recent post, I discussed Faiza W. Sayed’s bold ideas for reforming the Asylum Office and reducing the backlog (which currently stands at well over 1.3 million cases). But the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the Asylum Office cannot be saved. It should be eliminated. (more…)
There are currently more than 1.3 million cases pending at our nation’s Asylum Offices. One reason for this massive backlog is that the number of asylum applicants far exceeds the ability of the Asylum Office to process cases. Another reason is the U.S.-Mexico border, where Asylum Officers (AOs) interview each new arrival to determine whether they meet the initial eligibility requirements for asylum. These interviews sap significant resources from the Asylum Office, though lately, the situation at the border has been easing. A third big reason for the backlog–and the subject of today’s rant–is the way AOs conduct asylum interviews, which routinely take four or five hours, and which waste considerable time on irrelevancies. (more…)
The Republican Party has released its Platform for 2024. As usual with these things, it is short on specifics and long on political rhetoric. The first issue mentioned in the Platform is immigration: “Common Sense tells us clearly, in President Trump’s words, that ‘If we don’t have a Border, we don’t have a Country.'” It continues: “We must not allow Biden’s Migrant Invasion to alter our Country.” “Under the Trump Administration and a Republican Congress, it will be defeated immediately.” But how?
The Platform has a six-part plan “to stop the open-border policies that have opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of illegal Aliens, deadly drugs, and Migrant Crime.” Here, we’ll take a look at the plan and I will offer some thoughts. (more…)
The Asylum Offices have lately begun scheduling interviews for the longest-waiting applicants. The good news is that people who have been waiting seven, eight, nine years or more are finally receiving interviews. The bad news is that the Asylum Offices are giving little notice prior to the interview–often only a week or two–and so applicants have insufficient time to get ready.
Last time, I wrote about what applicants themselves should be doing now to prepare for their interviews. Today, we’ll discuss how the Asylum Offices can improve efficiency and ensure due process of law for asylum seekers. (more…)
Recently, the Asylum Offices have started scheduling interviews for applicants who filed years ago. In our office, we’ve seen a couple cases from 2015 get scheduled in Virginia, and I have been hearing from other lawyers about their old applications receiving interview notices in Virginia and at other Asylum Offices. That’s good news for applicants who have been waiting years for an interview. But as they say, every silver lining has a black cloud, and the black cloud here is a lack of sufficient notice to prepare for the interview.
Today, we’ll discuss what is happening at the Asylum Offices and what applicants should be doing now to get ready for their interviews. In a future post, we’ll talk about how the Asylum Offices can improve the system and ensure that applicants receive due process of law. (more…)
Sometimes, the evidence you leave out of an asylum case is as important as the evidence you include.
Here, we’ll look at what evidence is best kept out of a case, how to decide whether to submit evidence that has harmful and helpful components, and how to evaluate the risks inherent in excluding unhelpful evidence. (more…)
A forthcoming article by Professor Faiza W. Sayed of Brooklyn Law School examines the history and failings of the U.S. affirmative asylum system, and proposes some bold solutions that could help save asylum as we know it.
I should start by saying that I am a fan of Prof. Sayed’s work. She and her team at the Safe Harbor Clinic recently published a scathing report about the New York Asylum Office, which examines why that office has the lowest grant rate in the United States. The Professor was kind enough to send me a draft of her upcoming article, Reimagining Affirmative Asylum, which builds on her previous study. Her proposed reforms offer hope that our beleaguered asylum system can still be salvaged. (more…)
Here’s a hopefully hypothetical scenario: You apply for asylum (or some other relief) in Immigration Court and the judge denies your case. What do you do?
The losing party in Immigration Court has the right to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which is a higher court that reviews the decision of the Immigration Judge (IJ) to determine whether the IJ made a mistake. If you “win” your appeal, the BIA will explain the IJ’s error and “remand” (send back) the case to the judge to issue a new decision.
Today, we’ll discuss how to evaluate your chances for success on appeal, how the appeals process works, and what happens if you win or lose the appeal. (more…)
I recently prepared an asylum case for a married lesbian woman. The case was complicated by the fact that my client had multiple nationalities, and I was concerned about one country where she held citizenship, and where conditions were less bad for LGBT people (at least when compared with her other countries of nationality). My focus was on gathering evidence about country conditions to support her claim, and I forgot to look at another key aspect of the case–my client’s wife had a pending asylum application of her own.
As these things often go, I was reviewing the case prior to the Immigration Court hearing when I noticed the issue. I spoke to my client and learned that the wife’s case included information that would have been helpful for my client’s case. So now I had a dilemma: Should we amend our case at the last minute and risk harming my client’s credibility (when she tried to explain the change) or say nothing and forgo the opportunity to include helpful evidence? (more…)
It’s nearly impossible to win an asylum case if the Asylum Officer or Immigration Judge does not believe your story. But how do decision-makers determine whether an applicant is telling the truth or lying? In other words, how do they decide whether the applicant is credible?
There are a number of methods to evaluate credibility: Whether the applicant’s story is plausible (i.e., whether it makes sense in the context of country conditions), whether the person can describe details that we would expect her to know (for example, if she was a political activists, she should know something about her political party), and whether the applicant’s statement is consistent with the other evidence and testimony in the case. Today, I want to discuss “consistency,” since inconsistent statements are probably the most common basis for concluding that an applicant is not credible. (more…)
In an announcement earlier this month, USCIS claims to have “reduced overall backlogs by 15%.” This sounds like good news, and it would be–if it were actually true.
The reality, as discussed in the same announcement, is that “USCIS received 10.9 million filings and completed more than 10 million pending cases” in FY 2023 (October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023). While completing 10 million cases is no small accomplishment, by my math, if the Agency received 10.9 million cases and completed 10 million cases, their backlog has actually increased by 900,000 cases.
So why does USCIS claim that the backlog has been reduced by 15%? The answer hinges on the definition of the term “backlog.” (more…)
Data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review–the office that oversees our nation’s Immigration Courts–is notoriously unreliable. Nevertheless, we have to use what’s available. In that spirit, let’s take a look at EOIR’s statistics for Fiscal Year 2023 (which cover the period from October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023) and see what we can learn. (more…)