One of the requirements of graduating from UConn Law is that all students have to complete what’s called a practice-based legal requirement. You can do this either by participating in one of the law school’s in-house clinics, which provide free (or “pro bono” if you like fancy Latin) services to clients or doing a field placement.
This past academic year, I chose to complete my requirement by joining the Asylum and Human Rights Clinic, which represents people who have come to the United States to flee persecution in their home countries.
The asylum process can be a complicated one. To receive asylum, you have to prove that you have either suffered persecution in the past or have a well-founded fear of future persecution. Beyond that, the persecution has to be on the basis of one of five grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. The persecution has to be from either the government itself or an entity the government is unable or unwilling to control. Documenting this can be difficult, especially since immigrants applying for asylum are not guaranteed a court-appointed lawyer (unlike defendants in criminal cases). Many asylum seekers don’t have a lawyer at all and have to navigate this process alone - and many asylum seekers don’t speak English, have little formal education in their home country, or both.
The asylum clinic at UConn tries to bridge this gap by representing clients referred to them from local refugee rights organizations. Each client they take on is represented by two law students, supervised by one of the two clinic directors. In the fall, we take a seminar class where we learn about how to represent asylum seekers. We get training in the nuts and bolts of immigration and asylum law in the U.S., practical skills like interviewing clients and making arguments in court, and how to deal with clients who have experienced traumatic events without re-traumatizing them.
We also get fieldwork credits for our actual work with our clients. In the beginning, most of this is interviewing them and understanding their story. This can take a long time, for a variety of reasons. Our clients have gone through awful things and are often reluctant to trust anyone, particularly someone they perceive as being in a position of power or authority. Even when they come to trust us, talking about the awful things they’ve experienced is really difficult. Sometimes they will try to deliberately block out events from their memory. There can be cultural barriers that make it harder for us and our clients to understand each other, even with a really good interpreter. (We were lucky enough to work with a great one!) We have to know how to ask the right questions to make sure we’re getting the information we need without putting words in clients’ mouths or making them feel like there’s a “right” answer they need to give us.
One of the unexpected challenges was juggling schedules. Each week, we would have both an interview with our client and an interpreter and a check-in meeting with our clinic director. Eventually, we settled into a regular weekly time, but at first, it was a challenge to find a time when all four of us (client, interpreter, and two students) were available. On top of that, we also had to do a lot of reading and writing for the class part of our asylum clinic. I took a lighter course load in the fall to try to make room for it, but it was still a challenge to squeeze everything in!
An additional challenge was the emotional aspect of it. I don’t want to share any details of my client’s experience or any of the other clinic clients here - that would be a violation of their privacy and of the confidentiality agreement I signed. Suffice to say that all of them experienced things no human being should ever go through. Week in and week out, we had to have our client talk in detail about what had happened to her. She would sometimes break down in tears. At one point, I had to ask her to send me extremely graphic photos that she had taken to document what was happening to her community, which she did. I still think of those photos sometimes. You can’t unsee things like that.
There was a particularly tough day back in October. In the morning, my partner and I interviewed our client, where she disclosed some difficult things she and her family had been through. In class later that day, we had a peer review exercise where we read our classmates’ drafts of affidavits in which theye described what their own clients had been through and gave feedback on how they could best tell their clients’ stories. During all of this, I was texting when I could with a close friend going through an incredibly difficult experience of their own and trying to stave off suicidal ideation (the friend is okay now!). I left campus after class to get something to eat and instead broke down crying in the parking lot of the Cumberland Farms on the Berlin Turnpike.
I was experiencing something called vicarious trauma, in which people who try to connect with and help traumatized people end up with symptoms similar to those of people who have directly experienced trauma. It’s most common and best-understood in therapists who specialize in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, but it can happen to people in any kind of relationship with a person dealing with trauma. To compound things, I was criticizing myself for feeling badly - I wasn’t the one going through any of these things, so what right to be upset did I have? (To be clear: this is self-loathing nonsense! Some texts from my sister, who is a sexual assault nurse examiner and understands vicarious trauma well, got me out of this particular train of thought. But my depressed/anxious brain loves to latch on to self-loathing thoughts of any kind and “it didn’t happen to me, I shouldn’t be upset” is a really common one among people going through this kind of thing.)
A few things helped me push through the vicarious trauma. I made sure to talk about it with my own therapist. This was helpful because I could exploit a loophole: with everyone else, I had to be very careful about what I said so as to protect my client’s privacy. However, my therapist also has a legal and ethical duty to keep everything I say confidential! (Unless I’m plotting murder or something. Which hasn’t happened in a session yet, but never say never, I guess.) I still made an effort not to divulge too many details about my client, but I could talk more openly about what I was hearing. I also tried to use other self-care tools. In particular, I started meditating more regularly before going to bed at night.
I also tried my best to take inspiration from my client. Despite everything she’s been through, she’s been incredibly brave, fighting back against the people who have harmed her and getting herself to safety. I told myself that if she was brave, I could be brave too. That she needed me to pull myself together so I could fight for her.
The other clinic students were a source of support, too, or at least commiseration. We were all in this together. Our individual cases were different, but we were juggling the same enormous workload and dealing with the same emotional minefields. We could vent to each other and lean on each other when we needed it. The UConn Law community as a whole is a wonderful thing, and us asylum clinic students became an especially tight-knit and supportive group.
The political situation also made things harder once the November elections came and went. The first time Trump was president, his administration made it more difficult to get asylum, and we were concerned that the Department of Justice would seek to overturn legal precedent related to one of our theories for why our client should be granted asylum. Our client was also concerned about being targeted by ICE. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, ICE tried to make a big show of raids, and some people got caught up in the raids who were legally allowed to be in the U.S. I had to counsel my client about how to protect herself if she was questioned by ICE. Even with me telling her what documents to show them and what to say, she was still scared. Truth be told, I was scared for her too. About a month and a half before her hearing, I had a vivid nightmare that her hearing had just disappeared from the calendar with no way to get it back on the schedule. (Yes, I frantically checked the EOIR website when I woke up just to make sure the hearing was still there.)
And yet, we had to keep going. On top of getting our client’s story, we had to collect corroborating evidence. Some of this is the documentation my client brought with her. This can be hard for asylum seekers to collect, particularly if they had to leave their home country in a hurry, had a long or dangerous journey to the U.S. (many asylum seekers do), don’t have friends or relatives left in the area who can help gather the evidence, or are dealing with hostile governments in their home country. Fortunately, my client was able to gather most of the relevant documents, though there were a few that we were unable to get.
We also tried to get supporting declarations from people who knew our client and had also witnessed what she had been through in her home country. This was difficult. One person who was central to our client’s story refused to have any contact with her at all after a particularly frightening incident. Another person initially seemed willing to help, but was advised not to by close friends out of fear that helping our client would also make this person a target of the same people who had harmed our client. Fortunately, one brave person was willing to work with us. Much like we did with our client, we interviewed this person a few times (with the added difficulty that they aren’t in the U.S. and we had to rely on WhatsApp calls with sometimes spotty reception), drafted a declaration telling their story, and worked with them to make sure it was exactly right.
You also have to document the country conditions. There are two goals with this. First, you have to prove that your client is credible by showing that things like what happened to them are happening often enough in that country to be documented. Second, you need to show that circumstances have not changed since your client left. Usually, if an asylum seeker can document past persecution, it’s assumed that they have a well-founded fear of the same persecution in the future. However, this isn’t always the case. If the other side can show that the threat is gone, the asylum seeker no longer has a well-founded fear and can be denied asylum. (For instance, if someone came to the U.S. from Russia seeking asylum as a political opponent of Vladimir Putin, but Putin was overthrown somehow before their hearing, the government would likely argue that the Russian asylum seeker doesn’t need it anymore.)
As the resident political expert on my client’s team, I did a lot of research on my own, pulling up reports from governments and human rights organizations. (If you want to see examples, the State Department has reports for every country; we included copies of both the report for the year our client fled and the most recent year in our evidence filing.) I also kept on top of the news in my client’s home country and included several articles detailing recent incidents. On top of that, one of the great things about the clinic is the well of experience to draw from. In this case, our clinic director knew of an expert academic who had studied the ongoing conflict in our client’s home country closely and had worked with the clinic on a previous case. The same expert prepared a country conditions report for us, explaining what was happening in that country in a way tailored to my client’s experiences and showing that her story was credible and she had good reason to fear having to return to that country.
We were also able to get an appointment with a forensic psychologist thanks to the clinic, who evaluated our client and wrote an expert report documenting her symptoms, how they connected to her past experiences, and how her mental health would deteriorate if she had to go back. This was a bit tricky, as in many countries, including my client’s home, needing mental health care is even more stigmatized than it is here in the U.S. We had to assure her several times that this was to help with her case and no one was going to try to lock her up in an insane asylum. But she again showed us how brave she is by going!
Finally, we had to prepare the legal argument. We had to cite past cases similar to our own and all the evidence we’d collected to prove every bit of our case: that our client had been persecuted, that it was because of a protected reason, that the government was unable or unwilling to help, that she had good reason to fear going back, and that she deserved a grant of asylum. We ended up writing a 25-page brief laying out the entire legal argument and filing it alongside all our evidence in early May.
Just two weeks later, we had our hearing. We were able to use our client’s written declaration as her testimony in lieu of direct examination. This was hugely helpful for not having to re-traumatize her by asking her to share, again, the many difficult things she’d been through. However, the Department of Homeland Security attorney at the hearing cross-examined her and did their best to poke holes in her story. (This is what good attorneys do, so I tried not to let it rub me the wrong way. I wasn’t always successful.)
Our client did a phenomenal job. We’d practiced with her twice before the hearing, with a clinic director playing the DHS attorney and guessing what type of questions they might ask our client. She was scared by this exercise, worrying she would make a mistake, but in both practice sessions and the real thing, she answered their questions truthfully and consistently with her declaration and the supporting evidence.
At two points, I was scared. One small part of my client’s declaration (a single paragraph out of over 100) involved a measure of land in hectares. My clinic partner and I weren’t familiar with hectares and weren’t sure if the judge would be, so we checked Google for a conversion to acres and included the conversion in our client’s declaration. In the cross-examination, the DHS attorney asked our client how many acres are in a hectare. When she - very reasonably! - didn’t know off the top of her head, the DHS attorney tried to use this to attack her credibility and accuse her of not writing her own declaration. In retrospect, this was a sign that her case was strong and the DHS attorney was really struggling to find a way to question our client’s story. But when the attorney started in on this line, I felt awful and briefly regretted including it. I silently prayed that I hadn’t sunk my client’s case with a goddamn unit conversion.
(For the record, there are 2.47 acres in a hectare. I’m sitting in my own apartment in a comfortable chair, no one is asking me questions in a language I need interpreted, and my ability to stay in the country is not on the line. I still had to check that figure.)
The other time was when I tried to object to a question. During the hearing, I was in charge of objections as needed and redirect examination, while my partner made the closing statement. I only objected to a few questions. On one of them, the DHS attorney misread a document in our evidence filing and started to ask a question about it with the wrong year and information. I was worried my client would be confused, so I objected to the question on the basis of mischaracterizing the evidence and tried to quickly explain the actual year and purpose of the document. The DHS attorney responded with “Your Honor, she’s trying to testify.” At this point, the clinic director (who was also our supervising attorney) jumped in with a better explanation and the DHS attorney rephrased the question. I felt so ashamed after that. I know it’s part of lawyering, but I felt like I’d fucked up and I was scared. (Though now I doubt that the DHS attorney, who was the one actually misreading the doc, felt equal shame.)
Despite all this, we made it through cross-examination and I had a chance to do what’s called redirect, in which I could ask my client questions and give her a chance to make her case and address any concerns the DHS attorney or the judge brought up. We took a quick break after cross-examination so my partner, the clinic director, and I could discuss strategy, and we landed on a short list of questions. I felt more confident about this than I did about objecting to questions. Once again, my client did a great job and gave clear, consistent answers.
My clinic partner handled the closing argument, which we’d carefully drafted together but he was adjusting on the fly to emphasize points that had come up earlier in the hearing and discard arguments we didn’t need. He did a great job. I actually saw the judge smile a little bit at one of his arguments!
Finally, the judge delivered his decision. In asylum cases, it’s common for both sides to waive a written opinion so that the judge can announce a decision at the end of the hearing, if they want to, and that happened here. The judge took his time going through his thinking, and at first I was nervous, but as he went through it, I realized how good it was. He discussed our client’s credibility, acknowledging the DHS attorney’s concerns but ultimately deciding she was credible. He talked about the similarity between our client’s case and a very similar previous case we’d highlighted in our legal brief, using that case to decide that our client’s treatment was also on protected grounds. He noted that country conditions hadn’t changed - in his words, if anything, they were getting worse. Finally, he noted that the severity of the harm our client had suffered was a good reason to grant humanitarian asylum and that there wasn’t a discretionary reason to deny asylum that would outweigh the risk of harm.
Unlike most of the hearing, the interpreter didn’t interpret this part for our client, who doesn’t speak any English. She was sitting at a table a few feet away from us, so we couldn’t speak to her while the judge was speaking, and she looked nervous while the judge explained his reasoning. I tried to catch her eye and smile at her, somehow reassure her it was going well, but I’m not sure if it worked.
At long last, the judge asked the interpreter to begin again. He told our client “I am going to grant you asylum.”
Our client raised her arms all the way in the air and cried “Gloria a Dios!,” then began crying tears of joy. Our entire team stood up and hugged her. I will never, as long as I live, forget that moment.
After the hearing, we got to briefly celebrate with a few other clinic students and my dad and stepmom, who had all come to support us. We went back to the clinic office, where another clinic student couldn’t stay for the hearing but had dropped off Popeyes as a post-hearing treat, and talked with our client about how the hearing had gone and how a few logistical things would work. I drove our client home after and got to listen in as she called the person who had submitted a declaration. Our client briefly put the call on speaker so I could thank them for their letter (in my broken Spanish) and they could thank me for our work.
I was exhausted after the hearing and spent much of the long weekend after trying to catch up on sleep and reflecting on what we’d done. In some ways, the hearing was terrifying. For my client, being returned to her home country could have meant unimaginable treatment, possibly even death. She trusted us to keep her safe, and this time we did. I felt the weight of that responsibility. I went into a bit of a funk after receiving an exam grade that weekend that wasn’t what I hoped for, and I think it was in part because that responsibility was still in my head. A law exam is very different from a hearing, but still, I don’t want to fuck up!
And yet, I would do it a thousand times over. For her and for everyone else seeking safety here. It was an honor.