Immigration Courts across the U.S. have been randomly rescheduling and advancing cases without regard to attorney availability or whether we have the capacity to complete our cases. The very predictable result of this fiasco is that lawyers are stressed and overworked, our ability to adequately prepare cases has been reduced, and–worst of all–asylum seekers are being deprived of their right to a fair hearing. Besides these obvious consequences, the policy of reshuffling court cases is having other insidious effects that are less visible, but no less damaging. Here, I want to talk about some of the ongoing collateral damage caused by EOIR’s decision to toss aside due process of law in favor of reducing the Immigration Court backlog. (more…)
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Immigration Court is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. Also, some of the chocolate is poison.
For many applicants in Immigration Court, the most important factor in determining success is not the person’s story or the evidence or the quality of their lawyer. It is the judge who is randomly assigned to the case. According to TRAC Immigration, a non-profit that tracks asylum approval rates in Immigration Court, Immigration Judge (“IJ”) approval rates vary widely. For the period 2017 to 2022, asylum approval rates ranged from 0% (a judge in Houston) to 99% (a judge in San Francisco). Of the 635 IJs listed on the TRAC web page, 125 granted asylum in less than 10% of their cases. At the other extreme, nine IJs granted asylum more than 90% of the time.
Based solely on these numbers, there is a 20% chance (1 in 5) that your IJ denies at least 90% of the asylum cases that he adjudicates. That’s pretty frightening. But there is much more to the story, which we will explore below. (more…)
If you are reading this blog (which presumably, you are), you already know about the massive delays at our nation’s Asylum Offices. There are currently about 543,000 pending cases, and some applicants have been waiting for an interview for six, seven, eight years or longer. Given that life happens during this long wait, applicants sometimes want to withdraw their application for asylum. In this post, we’ll talk about when it might be appropriate to withdraw a case and how to do that. (more…)
I recently read an article in the Washington Post about the treatment of political activists in Iran: “Protesters arrested in Iran face a justice system stacked against them.” Political detainees in Iran are denied due process of law, denied access to a lawyer, and forced to litigate their cases in a tribunal that acts more like a prosecutor than like a neutral arbiter. Reading about the situation in Iran, I couldn’t help but think of my own clients’ experience with EOIR–the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that oversees our nation’s Immigration Courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals.
Here, we’ll look at some of the practices in Iran and compare them to what we see every day in U.S. Immigration Court. (more…)
This post is by Larry Gollub, who writes: I first encountered a proposal to create a professional corps of asylum adjudicators while in law school in 1985 and immediately knew that was what I wanted to do. I had to wait till 1991 for the government to create the asylum corps, but was hired with the second wave of new officers in 1992, serving with the asylum corps in one capacity or another until my retirement in 2015. I was asked to return to the training program on a part time basis in 2017 and stayed there through 2019. After returning to retirement, I worked with a group from the Asylum Officers union to draft Amicus Briefs to be filed in numerous court cases challenging Trump Administration policy changes. My main contribution was my detailed knowledge of the history of the asylum program.
About a dozen years ago, while researching just what the public thought an Asylum Officer did, I came across this post, by a person calling herself Lucette, in an online discussion thread conveniently titled, “Asylum Officer Qualifications”:
I am an immigration attorney with 3 years experience in Immigration Law and an interest in asylum law. I have successfully represented asylum applicants before CIS and in Immigration Court over the past three years. I am interested in a position as an asylum officer and I am wondering whether anyone would be so kind as to tell me whether my qualifications are such that I would be a viable candidate?
Lucette was constantly being passed over in her applications for employment as an Asylum Officer (“AO”) and wanted to know why. (more…)
On October 27, 2022, a group of torture survivors held a protest outside the Arlington Asylum Office. The protesters were asylum seekers who have been waiting for five years or more for an interview. Their request was simple: Please interview me and give me a decision in my asylum case. (more…)
I wrote last time about recent updates from the Asylum Division. Here, I want to focus on one element of those updates: How the Asylum Offices are dealing with asylum applications from Afghan evacuees.
Since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021, about 88,000 Afghans have been evacuated by the U.S. government and brought to our country. These are generally people who cooperated or worked with the United States or the prior Afghan government, plus their immediate family members. These Afghans would be at risk of harm or death in their country due to their affiliation with the United States or the prior government of Afghanistan.
Ideally, we would have brought these people here and given them permanent status, so they could feel stable and safe, and so they could start rebuilding their lives. Unfortunately, that is not what happened. A bill to regularize the status of Afghan evacuees–the Afghan Adjustment Act–has stalled in Congress, and so the evacuees are left in limbo, not knowing whether they can stay or whether they will have to leave. As a result, many evacuees have no other option but to seek asylum. This situation is absurd and insulting, and–adding injury to insult–the Asylum Offices are mishandling the Afghan’s applications. (more…)
In a meeting held earlier this month, we received some updates from the Asylum Division. Although Acting Director Sue Raufer could point to some positive developments in asylum world, the news is generally pretty bleak. In a development that will shock no one, the worst news relates to the backlog, which is growing at an unprecedented rate.
It is not easy to convey the magnitude of the ongoing disaster at EOIR, the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the office that oversees our nation’s Immigration Courts. Simply stated, the agency is rescheduling and advancing hundreds–maybe thousands–of cases without notifying attorneys, checking whether we are available to attend the hearings or checking whether we have the capacity to complete the cases.
On its face, this appears to be a mere scheduling problem. But in effect, it is a vicious and unprecedented assault on immigrants, their attorneys, and due process of law. (more…)
Dear Asylum Office –
Did you ever have an annoying friend who keeps wanting to tell you what’s what? Who couldn’t accept that you’re not interested in his advice about how to improve your life? Who blathers on about this-and-that without noticing that you’ve nodded off? I get it. But here I am anyway. The fact is, my dear Asylum Office, you’re a mess and something needs to be done.
Please don’t misunderstand when I say that you’re a mess. I am speaking as a friend. Or maybe a frenemy. According to your own data, there are now (as of December 2021) more than 438,500 cases pending at our nation’s Asylum Offices. Many applicants have been waiting for years without an interview and with no real hope of receiving a decision any time soon. The good news is that you’ve hired 80 brand-spankin’ new officers to interview older (pre-2016) cases. But the concern is that these officers will not be used efficiently or fairly. Luckily, I am here to offer some unsolicited advice about maximizing efficiency and protecting due process of law. (more…)
We learned last week that hackers have been using the Arlington Immigration Court phone number to make “spoof” calls requesting personal information from the recipients. EOIR (the Executive Office for Immigration Review – the office that oversees the Immigration Courts) warns that, to “protect yourself, be wary of answering phone calls from numbers you do not recognize” and never “give out your personal information over the phone to individuals you do not know.” Good advice. But how do you know whether a call from the Immigration Court is, in fact, fraudulent?
Fear not, for I stand ready to assist. Below are the top ten ways to know whether a phone call from EOIR is a “spoof” or the real deal. If you receive any of the following calls, hang up immediately because it ain’t the Immigration Court– (more…)
I was very sorry to learn recently about the death of Immigration Judge David Crosland. Judge Crosland had been an Immigration Judge since 1997. I first met him when he arrived in Arlington, Virginia in about 2008. He later transferred to the Baltimore Immigration Court. Over the years, I have had many cases with Judge Crosland. In fact, I was scheduled to see him for an Individual Hearing tomorrow, for an Iraqi woman seeking protection from militias and terrorists in her home country.
Judge Crosland had his own style. Unlike most IJs, he started his hearings by questioning the applicants about their activities and instances of harm. Once he finished and established a framework for the case, he would turn things over to the applicant’s attorney. We then had to build on his framework (and often correct issues that came up during his questioning). While this was a challenging way to present a case, and left us with more uncertainty about how the direct examination would go, it also allowed Judge Crosland to hone in on aspects of the case that were of most concern to him. I will say that this was not my favorite way to present a case, and applicants were often confused by the IJ’s questions (and his soft voice). Nevertheless, Judge Crosland almost always “got it right” and it was hard for me to disagree with his decisions, even if we did not get the outcome we wanted. (more…)
It’s the rare occasion when I can report some good news, but it seems that USCIS is taking action to help people in the affirmative asylum backlog. According to the most recent data (from December 2021), there are about 438,500 cases pending at the Asylum Office. The large majority of these applicants have not yet received interviews. Now, USCIS has hired an additional 80 Asylum Officers who will be dedicated to interviewing applicants who filed for asylum on or before January 1, 2016, meaning that they will be interviewing asylum seekers who have been waiting the longest.
Here, we’ll discuss what this means for those applicants, and also for people who filed after January 1, 2016. I’ll also make some suggestions about how to schedule these interviews in a way that is fair to applicants and to their lawyers (i.e., I will beg USCIS to have mercy on us). (more…)
Back in 2019, the Trump Administration ended the long-standing practice of releasing data about our nation’s Asylum Offices. The Biden Administration has not seemed particularly eager to restore transparency, but now, a year and a half after President Biden took office, we finally have some new data from the Asylum Division. Mind you, the data is only current as of December 31, 2021, but we are told more information will be released soon. Since “soon” in asylum world tends to mean “not any time soon,” I’ve decided to write about the information we have now, rather than wait for a second data dump, which may or may not be released in the near future.
The new data gives us a lot to discuss and sheds some light on why cases are moving so slowly. It also raises questions about how the asylum system is working–or not working. (more…)
It’s common these days to find asylum seekers at the Asylum Office and in Immigration Court who filed their asylum application, form I-589, five, six, seven or more years ago. During that time, some information on the form becomes out of date. Also, new events occur which need to be added to the form. What is the best and most efficient way to update your asylum application at the Asylum Office and in court? (more…)