https://www.sfgate.com/news/texas/article/Credible-fear-for-US-asylum-harder-to-prove-13078667.php
Will & Emily report for AP:
LOS FRESNOS, Texas (AP) — Patricia Aragon told the U.S. asylum officer at her recent case assessment that she was fleeing her native Honduras because she had been robbed and raped by a gang member who threatened to kill her and her 9-year-old daughter if she went to the police.
Until recently, the 41-year-old seamstress from San Pedro Sula would have had a good chance of clearing that first hurdle in the asylum process due to a “credible fear” for her safety, but she didn’t. The officer said the Honduran government wasn’t to blame for what happened to Aragon and recommended that she not get asylum, meaning she’ll likely be sent home.
“The U.S. has always been characterized as a humanitarian country,” Aragon said through tears at Port Isabel, a remote immigration detention center tucked among livestock and grapefruit groves near Los Fresnos, a town about 15 miles (25kilometers) from the Mexico border. “My experience has been very difficult.”
As part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently tightened the restrictions on the types of cases that can qualify someone for asylum, making it harder for Central Americans who say they’re fleeing the threat of gangs, drug smugglers or domestic violence to pass even the first hurdle for securing U.S. protection.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has overturned protections for asylum seekers in a decision that could affect thousands. Sessions ruled that a 2014 Board of Immigration Appeals decision that protected domestic violence victims from Central America was wrongly decided. Under the new ruling, “the applicant must show that the government condoned the private actions or demonstrated an inability to protect the victims,” in order to qualify for asylum protection. Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems, even all serious problems, that people face every day all over the world. I will be issuing a decision that restores sound principles of asylum and long-standing principles of immigration law.
Immigration lawyers say that’s meant more asylum seekers failing interviews with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to establish credible fear of harm in their home countries. They also say that immigration judges, who work for the Justice Department, are overwhelmingly signing off on those recommendations during appeals, effectively ending what could have been a yearslong asylum process almost before it’s begun.
“This is a direct, manipulated attack on the asylum process,” said Sofia Casini of the Austin nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, which has been working with immigrant women held at the nearby T. Don Hutto detention center who were separated from their kids under a widely condemned policy that President Donald Trump ended on June 20.
Casini said that of the roughly 35 separated mothers her group worked with, more than a third failed their credible fear interviews, which she said is about twice the failure rate of before the new restrictions took effect. Nationally, more than 2,000 immigrant children and parents have yet to be reunited, including Aragon and her daughter, who is being held at a New York children’s shelter and whose future is as unclear as her mother’s.
In order to qualify for asylum, seekers must demonstrate that they have a well-founded fear they’ll be persecuted back home based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinions. The interviews with USCIS asylum officers, which typically last 30 to 60 minutes, are sometimes done by phone. Any evidence asylum seekers present to support their claims must be translated into English, and they often don’t have lawyers present.
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“The asylum officer conducting credible fear (interviews) has been instructed to apply A.B., so when the person says, ‘My boyfriend or my husband beat me’ it’s, ‘So what, you lose,'” said Paul W. Schmidt, a former immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia, who retired in 2016. “It then goes to the immigration judge, who has just been ordered to follow Sessions’ precedent — and most of them want to keep their jobs and they just rubber stamp it, and there’s no meaningful appeal.”
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Read the full article at the link.
The now long forgotten “EOIR Vision” developed by our Executive Group in the late 1990s was “To be the world’s best administrative tribunals guaranteeing fairness and due process for all.”
Under Sessions, the U.S. Immigration Courts have been converted into kangaroo courts that are a parody of Due Process and fairness. Since the Immigration Courts are one of the foundations upon which the U.S. Justice System rests, that doesn’t bode well for justice or the future of our country as a Constitutional democratic republic.
PWS
07-16-18