Spring 2009 - Seattle University

Campus
O B S E R V E R
justice
Legal Aid
Law students help secure asylum for East African women
Two women from East Africa,
who found themselves
in a foreign country—the
United States—spoke limited
English, had little means and no family
are starting new lives here thanks
largely to the work of students from
the School of Law Immigration Law
Clinic and Legal Writing program.
Last fall the women were granted
asylum, which means
they can legally work
and live in the United
States—both now call
Seattle home—and become
permanent residents
within a year. In
five years they can apply
for citizenship.
The outcome of their
asylum cases was the culmination
of months of work by four
law students at the clinic: Karin
Tolgu, Andrew Buffington, Grant
ManClark and Yunji Kim, who
assisted Monika Batra, then-adjunct
professor at the clinic. The students
were charged with the task of preparing
applications for asylum as well as for
T-visas, granted to victims of human
trafficking. The four partnered with
more than 60 first-year legal writing
students who spent hundreds of hours
researching the asylum cases and
examining the claims from different
legal angles.
“I wanted my students to think,
through meeting with the clients,
about the arbitrariness of laws around
immigration,” Batra says. “Through
the law clinic, students are able to
connect with clients in a way that
humanizes the experience and debunks
this dichotomy of us vs. them.”
“This project was a textbook
example of effective collaboration
and service learning.”
Laurel Oates, director, Legal Writing
The women’s cases were compelling
but not without challenges. As young
girls they were subjected to female
genital mutilation and as adults each
found work with a family in the Middle
East in what amounted to forced
servitude. The women accompanied
the family on many of their travels
and during one of those trips to the
States in 2007, they were able to
escape and eventually made their way
to Seattle. Once here the women were
put in contact with the Northwest
Immigrant Rights Project, one of
the largest immigrant rights legal
organizations in the nation that the
law school works with, that in turn
referred their cases to the law clinic.
Batra, now associate director of
the Access for Justice Institute, and
her students identified interpreters,
met with the women for more than
60 hours to learn their stories, prepared
the applications and worked
with various law enforcement
officials and social
service agencies to secure
housing and food assistance.
Given the two forms
of immigration relief
sought, there was much
work to be done. To be
granted asylum, a person
must prove a wellfounded
fear of persecution if they
return to their home country based
on their race, religion, gender, nationality
or membership in a particular
social group.
Initially the women’s cases seemed
straightforward, but a ruling by the
Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)
during the course of the process complicated
matters. The BIA decision was
later reversed, and nearly a year after
their cases were first presented to the
law school, the women secured asylum.
“This project was a textbook ex-
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