Refugee Protection and the One-Year Asylum Deadline

By Laura A. Gretz '12

Over the course of this semester, I have been interning with Human Rights first in their Refugee Protection Program as their sole legal intern. What drew me to HRF was the opportunity to learn more about immigration law while simultaneously using my knowledge of Spanish to interview potential asylum candidates. I was interested in interacting more with clients after having no client contact while working this summer in the prosecution office at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Tanzania.

Unlike BLS’ Safe Harbor Clinic, HRF does not directly represent asylum candidates but performs initial intake interviews to assess the strength of asylum claims through reporting on the candidate’s personal history, fear of return to their home country, and the corresponding country’s conditions. I have written several of these intake reports, and once they are compiled, HRF’s senior counsel decides whether the information warrants assigning the candidate’s claim to one of the firms on HRF’s referral list that provides pro bono assistance to asylum seekers. HRF reasons that abstaining from direct representation of asylum seekers allows it to ultimately help more people as well as engage in more policy advocacy.

One of the policy issues most significant to HRF at present is the one-year deadline associated with asylum application, which requires asylum seekers to file within one year of arriving in the U.S. I attended an HRF briefing on a report written by several of its staff attorneys analyzing and discussing many of the pitfalls associated with this aspect of the asylum law, which has led asylum seekers to increasingly file for “withholding of removal” in place of asylum. “Withholding of removal” originated as an alternative for immigrants with asylum-barring criminal convictions who still had genuine reasons for fearing deportation.

The disadvantage of “withholding” is that recipients are permanently precluded from ever receiving permanent residency or citizenship and cannot leave the U.S. temporarily or they will be denied re-entry. This raises serious equitable concern over the fact that immigrants with no criminal convictions who have failed to meet the one-year deadline—very likely due to post-traumatic stress or simple survival reasons—are forced nonetheless to resort to filing for “withholding.” HRF is optimistic that immigration judges and attorneys are voicing their concern over the disadvantages of the one-year deadline and that its policy advocacy on Capitol Hill will help influence abrogation of the requirement.

A version of this article appeared in print in the December 2010 issue of the Bridge.