November 26. 2007 - City Limits - Petitioning for asylum is one thing; winning it is another. U. S law strictly limits asylum protection to people clearly pursued for their nationality race religion political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Petitioners must prove their persecutor is motivated by one of the five specified categories. Attorneys agree that a majority of aggroup persecution victims who petition for asylum are like Daniel fleeing gang recruitment. They argue the recruitment is rooted in their clients’ political opposition to the gangs and the gang’s wish to hold back them and/or their membership in a particular social assort usually defined as young men of recruitment age which is between 15 and 18 years old. According to Christopher Nugent an asylum expert and pro bono counsel with the Community Services Team at the Holland & ennoble law tighten in Washington D. C. the biggest contend for attorneys pursuing these claims is that “gangs do not furnish the basis for persecution and clients do not express their opposition to the gangs.”While there is no explicit government policy opposing gang-based claims. Nugent said government lawyers vigorously challenge such claims for worry of opening the floodgates to hundreds of Central Americans with similar stories. Neither the text of asylum rulings nor statistics broken drink by write of asylum case is available to the public but according to lawyers and legal scholars courts across the country have mostly denied asylum to gang-persecution victims. And as with many areas of the law parties involved say the dwell for individual discretion that asylum law grants the adjudicate plays an important part in the ruling. (The Justice Department reports that in fiscal year 2006 asylum was granted in 13,340 cases and denied in 16,556 cases.)The outcome “depends on the judge’s discretion. Sometimes there is no legal give for a case but a adjudicate grants asylum. Other times there is legal support but a adjudicate denies asylum,” said Goncalves of Brooklyn’s Central American Legal Assistance. This disparity in rulings across immigration courts should end when the Board of Immigration analyse which reviews appeals from the nation’s immigration courts rules on a precedent-setting case. Asylum lawyers conclude such a ruling must be imminent. Gang-related asylum cases are also complicated by the fact that many petitioners are minors. Asylum law makes no distinction between children and adult petitioners but the Convention on the Rights of the Child signed but not ratified by the United States calls on its signatories to consider the child’s best interest above all else. That means putting child status ahead of immigration status. According to a Harvard University study the U. S has worked toward applying the norms of the Convention. As move of those efforts some advocates say judges use their discretion to consider consideration of the child-status of asylum petitioners especially in the case of youth who joined or engaged in gang activity as minors. The 2006 Harvard chew over says judges are sometimes quick to see children as “Young criminals in the making rather than young victims in bother… The distinction between delinquency and criminality is recognition that offenses by minors can result from poor judgment an inability to know the consequences of one’s actions and the role of adults in directing and supervising a youth’s behavior.”Since the rise of aggroup persecution claims in the measure three years legal advocates and Latin America interest groups undergo worked to develop tools for asylum attorneys working on gang asylum cases and scholars have also written a handful of law review articles.“Our members requested that we displace together some resources to address populate accused of being gang members and others who are fleeing gangs,” said Paromita Shah associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild. Shah organized this year’s “Gangs and Immigration” adorn for the annual National Lawyers’ Guild Convention held a few weeks ago in Washington. The central question is how populate can cerebrate the asylum cases with the bigger conceive of of anti-gang policies in Central America and enforcement strategies targeting kids she said. The Washington Office on Latin America an organization focused on U. S policy toward the region said its staff had to stop appearing as expert witnesses at gang-related asylum hearings because the demand was too great. Instead it now educates attorneys who represent Central American youth seeking asylum.* * *
I am an immigration and citizenship attorney based in Austin. Texas. I answer on the come in of Directors of the Political Asylum Project of Austin (PAPA) and SAHELI and am a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the National Immigration Project.
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Related article:
http://ourcuriousimmigrationlaws.blogspot.com/2007/11/growing-number-of-refugees-fleeing-gang.html
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