🗽”My heart is full! My heart is full.” ❤️ — GW IMMIGRATION CLINIC SAVES ANOTHER LIFE!😎

GW Law Immigration Clinic Director Professor Alberto Benítez & Co-Director Paulina Vera

Please join me and Professor Vera in congratulating Immigration Clinic client, R-A-, from Nigeria, and his student-attorneys, Olivia Russo, LinLin Teng, Kennady Peek, Lea Aoun, and Megan Elman. The client’s asylum application was filed on December 3, 2018, his interview at the Asylum Office was on September 3, 2021, and he was granted asylum on May 18, 2022. We received the approval notice yesterday. The above-captioned is what R-A- said upon learning about his asylum grant.

R-A- is a gay man and LGTBQ+ activist. Throughout his entire life, R-A- experienced bullying and threats and had to keep his dating life a secret. However, things got even worse for him once he started an LGTBQ+ online magazine that received international attention. His family disowned him. A former classmate also set him up and he was physically beaten, sexually assaulted, called derogatory names, blackmailed, and outed. Since coming to the U.S., R-A- has continued to work on his online publication and volunteer for other LGBTQ+ initiatives. He hopes to one day attend law school in the U.S.

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Alberto Manuel Benitez

Professor of Clinical Law

Director, Immigration Clinic

The George Washington University Law School

650 20th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20052

(202) 994-7463

(202) 994-4946 fax

abenitez@law.gwu.edu

THE WORLD IS YOURS…

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Thanks for the update and for all you and your student attorneys do for American justice! Once again this shows the effect of expert representation of asylum seekers and the critical importance of winning cases at the first possible level, in this case the USCIS Asylum Office. Who knows what might have happened if this had been sent over to the “EOIR roulette wheel,” where life or death justice for immigrants has become a “high-stakes game of chance?” 🎰

Incredibly, three years ago, during the depths of the Trump regime, EOIR Executives actually misdirected agency resources into assembling bogus claims and misinformation intended to minimize and downplay the importance of representation in Immigration Court as well as to cover up the gross violations of due process that had become routine at EOIR. See, e.g., https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/05/13/multiple-organizations-call-bs-on-eoirs-lie-sheet-no-legitimate-court-would-make-such-a-vicious-unprovoked-disingenuous-attac/

Perhaps even more remarkably, most of the folks who participated in that “intentional misdirection” remain on the agency payroll under Garland, a number in their same positions.

The lack of an Attorney General who “gets it” (apparently a staple of Dem Administrations) and who is willing to clean house and make the necessary aggressive progressive reforms to restore due process at EOIR and throughout the Immigration bureaucracy is yet another reason why the work of clinics and other battalions of the NDPA remains so critical!  With a Government whose contempt for Due Process is amply illustrated by foot-dragging on Title 42 revocation, bogus, justice-denying “Dedicated Dockets,” and an appellate body that cuts corners while eschewing positive asylum guidance that would save lives, advocates for respondents are the only folks seriously interested in carrying out our Constitution and insuring that the rule of law is honored.

If that sounds like an indictment of Garland’s “leadership” on human rights, racial justice, and immigrant justice, that’s because it is!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

05-30-22

TRUMP’S TRANSGENDER TROOP BAN LATEST BIAS-BASED POLICY TO BE WHACKED BY US JUDGE!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-transgender-military-ban-blocked_us_59f7572ce4b0aec146792e00?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

HuffPost reports:

“Trump’s reasons for the controversial ban “do not appear to be supported by any facts,” the judge found.

A federal judge blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces on Monday.

“I am directing the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, to return to the longstanding policy and practice on military service by transgender individuals that was in place prior to June 2016,” United Stated District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her order.

Trump’s memorandum on the ban, which he released in August after first announcing the policy change in a series of tweets in July, has faced legal challenges from current and aspiring transgender service members who “fear that the directives of the Presidential Memorandum will have devastating impacts on their careers and their families,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote.

The reasons the Trump administration gave for enacting the ban, she continued, “do not appear to be supported by any facts.” While Trump defended the policy change as a cost-saving measure, analyses of the military budget found that spending on health care for transgender service members would be miniscule.

Read the full court order here.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.”

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Fact-free, biased, and prejudice-based policies are a specialty of the Trump Administration.

PWS

10-30-17