Group items tagged

"Welcome to the third edition of Immigration Equality and the Midwest Immigrant and Human Rights Center's LGBTQ/HIV Asylum Manual. Fully updated in 2006, this edition is a web-based document that can be viewed in its entirety online. Note: In January 2012, USCIS issued "Guidance for Adjudicating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex (LGBTI) Refugee and Asylum Claims." This offers invaluable information about how the asylum office adjudicates LGBTQI claims and should be reviewed by practitioners. The Manual would not have been possible without the work of many others (especially those who wrote the first two versions of the handbook). Please see the Preface and Acknowledgments for a complete list of such indispensable individuals. This handbook is intended for use by pro bono attorneys and immigration attorneys working on LGBTQ/HIV asylum cases. The handbook is not intended as legal advice and is not meant to be used by unrepresented asylum seekers to prepare their own applications."

Form used to authorize sharing data about immigrant in detention. "Your Full Name" refers to immigrant. Recipient is person to receive information. May be used to request attendance at asylum hearings.

US Department of State

1995 US House of Representatives resolution referred to Committee on International Relations: Concerning democracy and human rights situation in Cameroon.

2018 Strategy to defend US from drug trafficking, criminals. No operational means to reach goals.

Recent Memorandum Opinion which may be used to support parole requests.

Very useful guidelines and best practices for visitation programs.

"A benchbook is a book providing an overview of legal procedure for a judge. These books are used by judges while hearing cases as guides to assist in the disposition of a case. While benchbooks generally are not a source of substantive law, the EOIR Benchbook contained invaluable templates, motions, scripts, and cases for judges to cite to when entering orders." The EOIR Benchbook was mysteriously removed from the DOJ website in April of 2017 "Without these resources, both immigration attorneys and pro se respondents (immigrants who represent themselves without a lawyer) are at a great disadvantage. Susan Pai continues, "I hastily retrieved as much of the benchbook as I could before it disappeared from the Internet entirely. Meanwhile, my Kansas colleague Matthew Hoppock began the arduous endeavor of getting the EOIR Benchbook back online. He succeeded… for a time. The EOIR Benchbook was "archived" in an obscure location on the DOJ website. It was subsequently taken down again. After a Freedom of Information Act appeal, Attorney Matthew Hoppock was able to get the EOIR Benchbook back online. But, DOJ moved it to an obscure location on the website, did not update its DOJ website search engine to lead searches for the "EOIR Benchbook" to the right page, and the archived benchbook was only downloadable as a troublesome zip file." Links to the benchbook housed at none other than the Internet Archive are supplied in the blog post.

Press report to announce 2017 Report on Human Rights Practices. Ambassador Kozak stated the report focuses on what a government is doing about human rights issues, rather than what is happening in the society governed. He also stated, "one of the editorial rules we have in the report is if something - if an event occurred in one year, if there is - the second year after that, you can kind of say where it stands, but if it doesn't change, we drop it."

This link contains a FOIA'd spreadsheet with asylum grant and denial rates for all IJ's in the US. Want to see how a given judge stacks up, check here.

Uganda

Tips for writing to senators and representatives

Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Inspector General, OIG-07-28. February 2007

A Report Examining the Current Use of Alternatives to Immigration Detention. Rutgers School of Law-Newark Immigrant Rights Clinic in conjunction with the American Friends Service Committee, July 2012.