This site will work and look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Asylum and Human Rights Clinic

• The UConn Foundation's Annual Report features a case of the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic as one of its Stories of Achievement.
• Profiles of Cases from Prior Years

The Asylum and Human Rights Clinic provides desperately-needed representation to refugees fleeing from persecution, while giving law students an intensive learning experience that enhances their advocacy skills, fosters cross-cultural sensitivity and competence, and deepens their understanding of international human rights issues. Over its first six years, the Clinic has gained asylum or equivalent relief for 45 clients and their families, enabling them to remain in the United States as lawful residents rather than be deported to countries where they face persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or social group. The Asylum Clinic's representation has resulted in successful outcomes for our clients in 88% of the cases that it has handled so far. In contrast, the average "grant" rate for asylum cases in the immigration courts nationwide over roughly the same period has been 31%. The Clinic's success shows how essential it is for asylum seekers to have vigorous and effective legal representation. Not every case, of course, results in a grant of asylum, and for those clients whose cases could not be won the zealous representation and emotional support provided by the Clinic's law students was equally important.

The remarkable stories of several of the cases handled by the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic during the 2007-08 academic year are told below. The sections that follow provide a fuller description of the Clinic's program, staff, and activities.

Helping Clients Gain Refuge from Persecution

A Central American Family's Long Struggle for Safety

On May 8, 2008, in the Hartford Immigration Court, two Clinic law students, Kirstin Ramsay '08 and Anthony Goodman '08, won asylum for a woman from Guatemala. She fled to the United States more than a decade ago to escape severe abuse from her husband. Even when her husband tried to kill her with a machete, the police refused to get involved in this "domestic matter." Her youngest son remained behind in Guatemala, cared for by relatives. When her son reached early adolescence, the maras, one of the powerful criminal gangs that terrorize Central American societies, tried to recruit him into their ranks. He refused to join because he believed that their murderous activities were wrong. The maras subjected him to a barrage of beatings and abuse, and made oral and written death threats against his entire family. His mother arranged for him to flee Guatemala in 2005. He was caught at the U.S. border, and both he and his mother were placed in removal proceedings.

The evidence and arguments that Anthony and Kirstin presented at our client's removal hearing, including a moving direct examination of our client, a legal brief, affidavits from witnesses, and the report of a country conditions expert, convinced the immigration judge that the gender-based persecution that our client had suffered in the past, combined with the current risk of retaliation from the maras, made her eligible for asylum. The law is unsettled in this area, and grants of asylum in similar circumstances have been rare.

This victory was the culmination of a long legal struggle, involving tenacious advocacy by three teams of Asylum Clinic students over three years. In 2005, when our client's son was apprehended at the border, she learned that she had already been ordered deported by an immigration court in Los Angeles. When she had first arrived in the U.S. in 1994, fleeing from her husband's violence, she had applied for asylum, but never received notice of her hearing. In the spring and fall of 2006, Kenndra Leary-Poole '06 and Natalie Braswell '07 began to work on building evidence in support of the son's case for asylum, while filing a motion with the Los Angeles Immigration Court to overturn the mother's removal order. They obtained a ruling reopening the mother's case and transferring it to Hartford for a new hearing on her asylum claim. In the fall of 2006, another Clinic team, Lila McKinley '08 and Amarilis Carrion '08, represented the son at his hearing in immigration court. They presented a strong case and persuaded the judge that the boy's account was truthful, and that the threat he faced was real. The immigration judge, however, concluded as a legal matter that persecution for refusing to join a gang cannot serve as a basis for granting asylum. The students filed an appeal brief with the Board of Immigration Appeals. While that appeal was pending, the mother's asylum claim was granted by the immigration court, and her children were able to derive asylum status from her. As a result, the entire family has won the right to remain in the United States.

Making New Law That Safeguards the Rights of Refugees

On August 31, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an important precedent decision in one of the Clinic's cases, which will make it easier for people wrongly accused by oppressive governments of being involved in anti-government activities or coup attempts to obtain asylum in the United States. (Vumi v. Gonzales, 502 F.2d 150.) The case, argued in the appeals court by Professor Jon Bauer, arose from the Board of Immigration Appeals' denial of asylum to one of the Clinic's clients, a woman who was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the Congolese military because her husband was suspected of having been involved in the assassination of the country's dictator. While being tortured, she was repeatedly pressed for information about her husband's whereabouts and accused of having knowledge about the assassination plot. Corey Richter '05 and Jasmina Zecovic '05, as students in the Asylum Clinic, tried the case before the Hartford Immigration Court. The testimony and corroborating evidence they presented convinced the judge of the truthfulness of our client's story. Nonetheless, the immigration judge and the agency's appeal board found our client ineligible for asylum, reasoning that the military had a legitimate investigatory purpose in questioning her (since they were trying to locate a suspect in the head of state's murder), and therefore were not engaging in political persecution.

The Court of Appeals, in a strongly written decision, disagreed. It held that in countries that do not allow for peaceful political change, persecution for suspected involvement in an attempt to overthrow the government must be considered a form of political persecution, and it found that the agency improperly ignored evidence presented by the Clinic that the Congolese regime used the assassination as a pretext to punish its political enemies. The court also held that when a government targets a person simply because he or she is a family member of someone the regime is seeking to harm, this may constitute persecution based on "membership in a particular social group," one of the statutory grounds for granting asylum. The case was sent back to the Board of Immigration Appeals for further consideration. After the Clinic filed a new legal brief with the agency, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it no longer opposed a grant of asylum, and in March 2008 the case was concluded in our client's favor.

Protecting Political Dissidents from Persecution

At a hearing held in the Hartford Immigration Court in February 2008, Olotokunbo Green '08 and Melissa Hurst '08 won a grant of asylum for their client, a politician who ran for local office in his African homeland as a candidate of the ruling party, but was imprisoned and beaten by the government after he lost the election and made public statements blaming his defeat on the party's failure to meet the people's needs.

Another client was granted asylum by the Department of Homeland Security's Asylum Office, after a hearing at which she was represented by Asylum Clinic students Philip Torrey '08 and Andrew Sterling '08, who presented evidence that persuaded an asylum officer that our client had been imprisoned, tortured and raped by the Congolese military after she registered voters at an opposition political rally.

Olga Konferowicz '08 and Robert Ziemiecki '09 also made the long trip to the Asylum Office (located in Lyndhurst, New Jersey) for a hearing on behalf of a West African woman who suffers from serious physical disabilities as a result of an attack against her by government agents, who ran her down with a motorcycle because of her work for a dissident newspaper. Their client was granted asylum.

In all of these cases, highly effective presentations of client testimony, extensive and well-organized supporting documentary evidence, reports that the students secured from medical and country conditions experts, and cogent legal arguments helped to secure the favorable outcome. Rasheena Ford-Bey '08 and Karem Dioces '08 provided equally skillful and zealous representation at a hearing in the Hartford Immigration Court for a client who was targeted in her central African country because of her familial relationship to a government opponent, but an immigration judge rejected the claim. The case is now on appeal.

In June 2008, an immigration judge granted asylum to a former civics teacher from Haiti. In 2002, after our client denounced corruption in the regime of then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an armed mob of Aristide supporters attacked his home and shot at him as he fled. At his original hearing, held in January 2005, the immigration court denied him asylum, rejecting his testimony as inconsistent and implausible, but that decision was overturned after a series of appeals to the Board of Immigration Appeals and then the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (As students in the Asylum Clinic, Elissa Torto '05, Jason Marshall '05, Shannon Bratt '06, and Hinna Mushtaque '06 handled the hearing and appeal.) The appeal board ultimately ruled that inconsistencies in the client's testimony were minor and adequately explained, and did not warrant an adverse credibility finding. When the case went back to the immigration judge, the main issue was whether our client still has a well-founded fear of being persecuted in Haiti, despite the fact that Aristide is no longer in power. Testimony from a political scientist helped to convince the court that armed pro-Aristide elements remain active in Haiti and would still have the capacity and inclination to punish our client. Now that our client has finally been granted asylum, the Clinic is helping him to obtain visas to bring his children to the United States.

The Clinic Program: Combining Legal Education and Client Service

The Asylum and Human Rights Clinic is an intensive, eight-credit program in which law students learn substantive law and legal skills while serving the community and promoting human rights. The Clinic is offered in both the fall and spring semesters. Students who have participated in the program have the opportunity to continue their casework in a subsequent semester, by enrolling in Advanced Clinic Fieldwork, for which they may receive 1-3 credits.

Clinic students represent clients who have fled from persecution in their home countries and are seeking the right to remain in the United States. The tasks involved in a typical case include:

• Conducting multiple interviews with the client;
• Researching human rights conditions in the client’s home country;
• Preparing the asylum application and affidavits from the client and witnesses;
• Locating, assembling and organizing corroborating evidence that helps to prove that the client has been persecuted, and/or has a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group;
• Working with expert witnesses, including country conditions experts, physicians and mental health professionals;
• Preparing a brief outlining the factual and legal bases for the client’s claim;
• Presenting evidence, testimony and arguments at a hearing before the United States Immigration Court or the Asylum Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

There are three major facets of the Clinic program: casework, case team meetings, and seminars. The casework is central. Students, working together in teams of two, typically spend a minimum of 20 hours per week working on their clients' cases. Each student team meets regularly (generally once a week, but sometimes more) with a faculty advisor for an in-depth discussion of the casework. These meetings are used to help students recognize, analyze and resolve the multitude of strategic, tactical, ethical, and interpersonal issues that arise in representing clients. Clinic students and faculty, together with clients and witnesses, also participate in "mootings" to prepare for each hearing.

The Asylum Clinic seminar meets once a week, for three hours. Classes are used for a variety of purposes. Early in the semester, a few classes are used to survey the substantive law involved in Clinic cases. Other classes are devoted to teaching essential lawyering and cross-cultural skills that students will use in their casework; many of these classes involve role-playing exercises or workshops based on students' actual cases. Class time is also used for "case rounds," in which students share and learn from each other's experiences.

The Clinic's Faculty and Students

At the end of the 2007-08 academic year, the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic welcomed Margaret Martin as our new William R. Davis Teaching Fellow, and bid a fond farewell to Michelle Caldera, who held the Davis Fellowship from 2004-08. Michelle has joined the clinical faculty at Touro Law School in New York. Margaret Martin joins us as an experienced litigator who has worked both in private practice and at the Antitrust Bureau of the New York Attorney General's Office. She spent a year in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in a "rule of law" program sponsored by the American Bar Association, where she worked with local lawyers and human rights advocates to organize an effective public defender system. She has also served as a public interest counselor for law student at her alma mater, Columbia Law School.

The Davis Fellow shares teaching and case supervision duties with Professor Jon Bauer, the program's director. He has been a member of the law school's faculty since 1988, and has taught clinical programs and non-clinical courses focusing on civil rights, employment law, poverty law and mediation. He has been teaching in the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic since 2002.

During the 2007-08 academic year, twenty law students participated in the intensive Asylum and Human Rights Clinic program (12 in the fall semester, 8 in the spring), and four students continued to engage in clinic work through Advanced Clinic Fieldwork. Other law students provided valuable assistance to the Clinic's clients, and gained insight into international human rights issues and legal advocacy, by serving as language interpreters in the Clinic's cases.

Collaborations and Initiatives

The Asylum and Human Rights Clinic collaborated with experts in a variety of disciplines to enhance services for its client community and law students' professional education. The Clinic continued its longstanding collaborations with the University of Connecticut Health Center, Physicians for Human Rights and Doctors of the World to meet the mental health and medical needs of its clients. Dr. Julian Ford of UConn's Psychiatry Department and clinical social worker Trish Haynes Dayan shared their expertise on post-traumatic stress disorder with the Asylum Clinic's students as guest speakers in our classes. Other medical professionals joined them in volunteering their time to provide evaluations and treatment for our clients. Students in the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic also worked closely with political scientists, historians and academics from other disciplines who generously donated their time and expertise to serve as expert witnesses about conditions in our clients' home countries.

The Asylum Clinic also collaborated with lawyers and social service agencies throughout Connecticut to meet the needs of refugees and immigrants. Faculty members in the Clinic have been active participants in a statewide task force that has met regularly to coordinate services with the aim of ensuring that everyone facing removal proceedings will have access to legal representation. Professors Jon Bauer and Michelle Caldera, along with many UConn law student volunteers, participated in Citizenship Day, organized by the Connecticut chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which provided free full-day workshops to assist eligible immigrants in applying for United States citizenship.

The Asylum Clinic cooperated closely with legal services agencies, the private bar, and organizations including Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, Catholic Charities, and the International Institute of Connecticut, in making and receiving case referrals, and providing consultations. A Hartford law firm partnered with the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic in one of its cases: attorneys Elizabeth Arana and David Golden of the Brown Rudnick law firm provided pro bono representation to a Clinic client who was wrongly denied work authorization.

The Asylum and Human Rights Clinic is grateful for the generous support that has been provided by the Wilde Family Foundation, the Joshua Greenberg Memorial Fund, the William R. Davis Clinic Endowment Fund, and the University of Connecticut Human Rights Initiative. Their contributions have sustained the Clinic's work and made its ongoing success possible.