Dear Asylum Lawyer,We are students seeking your feedback on a project we are working on with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) to support asylum claims from the Northern Triangle. We aim to provide asylum lawyers with country conditions information tailored to specific issues that arise commonly in cases from the Northern Triangle but lack sufficient easily accessible factual support.This is where you come in. We need your advice to determine which issues and countries we should prioritize in our efforts. To that end, we’d be grateful if you could complete this survey, which should take approximately 5 minutes of your time: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TLSWOLA. We’d appreciate your feedback at your earliest convenience, and ideally by February 25.
Please contact us at templelaw.asylum.project@gmail.com with any questions about this survey. Thank you very much for your valuable time and input into this project. We appreciate your assistance!
Kindest regards,
Shannon McGuire and Jasper Katz
But, it’s going to take some great research and persuasive arguments to get judges “off” their traditional (probably over) reliance on the Country Reports. Once discredited, however, the Country Reports are unlikely to ever regain their “privileged position” in the hierarchy of country information. Actually, a pretty dumb move on the part of the Trumpsters. But, perhaps something that will benefit the system in the long run by leading to use of better and more reliable sources of information.