Liman Fellow John Giammatteo ’17: “A Weaponized Immigration Bureaucracy”
As a 2019-2020 Liman Fellow at Lutheran Social Services of New York, John Giammatteo ’17 represented asylum seekers in appeals and in federal court litigation. He wrote this essay, “Adapting to (and Challenging) a Weaponized Immigration Bureaucracy,” for The Liman Center Reports in the summer of 2020.
In July 2020, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security proposed regulations that attempt to gut decades of substantive asylum law. The proposals are incredibly far reaching. They attempt, among other things, to end gender as a basis for asylum and redefine political opinion to cover only opposition to a ruling government, not the full range of political activism and views that courts have continually recognized. They codify the Attorney General’s decision in Matter of A-B-, preventing access to asylum for those fleeing gender-based violence and gang-related persecution. The proposals heighten evidentiary standards and create new pleading standards for those persecuted as part of a particular social group. They also encourage immigration judges and asylum officers to exercise their discretion to deny any applicant who entered without inspection or travelled through another country on his or her way to the United States. Each provision alone strips asylum seekers of rights; their collective impact will make claiming asylum virtually impossible.
“The United States is now one of only four countries that charges a fee to apply for asylum.”—John Giammatteo ’17
Responding to these nativist policies has been a hallmark of my Liman Fellowship with Lutheran Social Services of New York’s Immigration Legal Program (LSSNY-ILP). LSSNY-ILP provides comprehensive immigration legal representation to underserved populations in New York City and represents clients in almost every type of immigration proceeding or application. My role generally focuses on appeals, but I split my time between direct representation, representing clients before the agency and in federal court, and more systemic work, including launching the Second Circuit Asylum Monitoring Project and drafting amicus briefings and administrative comments leveraging LSSNY-ILP’s expertise.
Challenging agency decision-making in asylum law is difficult, in part, because of a range of jurisdiction-stripping provisions. Any challenge to immigration court practice, or precedential opinions from the Board of Immigration Appeals, will be channeled into individual petitions for review heard by the courts of appeals. Hundreds are filed each year in the Second Circuit alone, often by private attorneys without the resources to litigate systemic issues.
We launched the Second Circuit Asylum Monitoring Project to identify petitions that could have broader systemic impacts and to leverage the expertise of legal services organizations. In collaboration with organizations throughout the United States, we have been able to set up an infrastructure for identifying the issues in each pending petition and then track those issues as they work through the Circuit. The eventual goal is to speak to the Circuit on every case that could set precedent on asylum, withholding of removal, or relief under the Convention Against Torture. The Project is collaborative and transubstantive: we can easily use the infrastructure that we have built to address new policies as the immigration-enforcement regime changes.
At the same time, I am so fortunate to work directly with clients as well. COVID-19 has made every piece of that representation much more difficult, however. Like most offices, we started working remotely in March. Our clients are facing increased financial insecurity and uncertainty. The immigration courts have been mostly closed for individuals not in detention; USCIS has spent months with closed offices, and threatened to furlough staff. Despite the closing of court, we have to be prepared in case they reopen with short notice. But preparing applications and interviewing clients are difficult. Many of our clients lack access to technology, and even trauma-informed work is challenging to do over Zoom or over the phone. Even basic logistics — getting signatures for forms, collecting evidence — takes much longer. In the face of these many challenges, however, we continue to adapt our practice to provide the support our clients need, and to help them navigate the shifting legal landscape. And we continue to strive toward a more just and humane immigration system.
