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ASYLUM GRANTED FOR MONGOLIAN NATIONAL
Heller Ehrman recently helped secure asylum for a Mongolian national who came to the U.S. in 2004. Our client was a successful professional in Mongolia who had been elected as a local officer in her home district where she worked for years to help women in Mongolia. Because of her success and her beliefs about women, her husband beat, raped and humiliated her for 15 years. The Mongolian police, including the ones in her own district that worked for her, refused to help her, telling her repeatedly that domestic violence was a family problem that she needed to work out with her husband. In 2004, she fled Mongolia because the beatings had become so severe that she believed her husband was going to kill her. Heller Ehrman will continue representing the client until derivative asylum applications are granted for her two sons.
PERMANENT RESIDENT STATUS GRANTED FOR YOUNG IMMIGRANT
Attorneys in Heller Ehrman’s Seattle office recently assisted a client in gaining lawful permanent resident status in the United States. Our client was an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been abused and abandoned by his parents, and then later abused by his grandparents with whom he lived. He ran away at age 13 and traveled on his own to California, where he was reunited with his mother. Rather than send the boy to school, his mother demanded that he work in the agricultural fields to pay for his own food, clothing and shelter. Our client left her and traveled to the Pacific Northwest, where he now lives with his aunt and her family. At the time of his detention by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, our client was within six months of turning 18. Heller Ehrman took the referral from Volunteer Advocates for Immigrant Justice in order to try to obtain Special Immigrant Juvenile status for our client before his 18th birthday. In over two years of representation, we helped our client through state court dependency hearings, represented him in front of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to obtain status as a Special Immigrant Juvenile and helped him through his application and interview for status adjustment.
POLITICAL ASYLUM WIN FOR IRAQI CHRISTIAN FAMILY
Heller Ehrman recently won an emotional political asylum victory in Immigration Court on behalf of a family of five from Iraq. The family is Chaldean Christian. They fled Iraq in November 2004, after suffering a string of attacks at the hands of Muslim extremists. During a seven-month period in 2004, the entire family was carjacked at gunpoint on their way to church; brutally attacked in their home and robbed in the middle of the night by masked men armed with machine guns; and, lastly, the husband was kidnapped and held hostage until his family paid a sizeable ransom. Fearing one or all of them would soon be killed, they left Iraq and fled to the United States, by way of Syria, Cuba, Belize and Mexico. The immigration judge granted the family asylum, finding that they had been persecuted and had a well-founded fear of future persecution in their homeland on the basis of statutory factors, including their Christian faith.
POLITICAL ASYLUM WIN FOR RWANDAN HUTU
San Diego’s Chris Eppich and Brandon Pace represented a 24-year-old refugee of Rwandan Hutu descent from the Democratic Republic of Congo in obtaining asylum. Our client’s story began during the mid 1990s when Rwandan Hutu extremists killed tens of thousands of Rwandan Tutsi. Subsequently, a systemic effort by the Tutsi was initiated to get even, and a merciless hunt for Hutu began. Although our client and his family had no part in the atrocities, his parents were killed and his siblings were taken by the Tutsi. He then began a journey that would lead him to the United States.
After years of hiding in eastern Congo, our client was arrested by the Rwandan Tutsi military during a peaceful protest. His captors discovered his Hutu ethnicity and he was beaten and imprisoned. After months in prison, our client managed to escape and fled to Burundi, where he hid for three years. Once Burundi became unsafe for Rwandan Hutu, our client secured a passport and visa and came to Southern California. Our client then retained Heller Ehrman, applied for asylum, withholding of removal, and convention against torture. After hearing the case presented by Brandon and Chris, the court granted our client’s asylum request.
VICTORY FOR LIBERIAN REFUGEES
Attorneys in the San Francisco office recently prevailed in an asylum claim on behalf of Charles and Florence Jackson of Liberia. In the late 1990s, Mr. Jackson worked as the Managing Editor of The New Democrat, the sole Liberian newspaper committed to truthful and objective journalism. He wrote and published numerous stories documenting patterns of government abuse that were commonplace under former Liberian President Charles Taylor. These stories put Mr. Jackson and his wife in constant danger: he was arrested, interrogated and repeatedly threatened with death when he refused to renounce stories critical of the government. By the time the Jacksons fled Liberia, they could no longer sleep in their house or go to work for fear that they would be arrested and killed.
Heller Ehrman represented the Jacksons before Judge Stephen Griswold of the Immigration Court in San Francisco. The judge said that Mr. Jackson is exactly the sort of person that U.S. asylum laws are designed to protect: a professional journalist whose fearless reporting on the atrocities of the Liberian government likely played a direct role in President Charles Taylor’s eventual exile. At the conclusion of the judge’s oral findings, the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security agreed to waive the government’s right to appeal. This is a major victory given the increasingly restrictive laws governing asylum, such as the recently enacted REAL ID Act, which further restricts asylum eligibility.
POLITICAL ASYLUM FOR SOMALI REFUGEE
Heller Ehrman represented Guuled Farah Hiirise, a 27-year-old Somali refugee, through our growing association with San Diego’s Casa Cornelia Law Center, a non-profit immigration assistance organization. When Guuled was 14 years old, civil war broke out in his home country, and his family was attacked and thrown out of their home. Over the next 12 years, Guuled faced many hardships, including kidnapping and torture (on two separate occasions), the murder of one sister, the disappearance of his other sister and the almost fatal shooting of his father. In 2003, Guuled escaped Somalia and spent two months traveling alone to South Africa, leaving his wife and family behind in Kenya. After surviving several robberies in South Africa, he made his way to Brazil by purchasing a ticket with money he earned selling items on the street. He hoped to eventually make his way to freedom, protection and opportunity in United States. After traveling for nearly seven months, navigating his way throughout South America despite the language barrier, Guuled finally arrived in the U.S. in August 2004. For the next year, he was detained by the federal government and kept locked in a maximum-security prison. The U.S. Immigration Court found Guuled’s fear of torture and persecution in Somalia to be credible and granted him political asylum. The Department of Homeland Security appealed the Immigration Court’s ruling, but, after a review of the briefing, the Department of Justice Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the Immigration Judge’s findings.
AWARD-WINNING IMMIGRATION LAW PROJECT
Corporate Pro Bono (CPBO), a national project co-sponsored by the Association of Corporate Counsel America and the Pro Bono Institute, awarded its 2006 CPBO Pro Bono Partner Award to Heller Ehrman, firm client Microsoft and several other law firms for creating Volunteer Advocates for Immigrant Justice (VAIJ). VAIJ, based in Seattle, assists detained immigrants seeking asylum and other forms of relief by providing free legal advice and representation. The award was presented in March at the Pro Bono Institute’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.
IMMIGRATION PANEL
On April 27, 2006, Heller Ehrman and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area jointly hosted a panel discussion to address the recently proposed immigration legislation in Congress and the related immigration debate. Heller Ehrman attorneys and staff, legal services attorneys and law students attended the event. The speakers included Lucas Guttentag, National Director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Judy Golub, Executive Director of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. Mr. Guttentag discussed the enforcement provisions of the legislation, including constraints on judicial review and the difficulty of conveying these intricacies to the general public due to the length and complexity of the proposed legislation. Ms. Golub spoke to the group about the nuts and bolts of the proposed legislation and the political and policy implications.
Heller Ehrman’s Ethnic Diversity Committee worked to bring this panel discussion together and plans to have similar events on issues that affect communities of color and diversity.
