Hearing screams of joy on the other end of the line never gets old. This week we won two appeals from the Board of Immigration Appeals. One is for a detained man who will now get a chance to *hopefully* be approved for cancellation of removal as a permanent resident. In that case, the Judge had already indicated that but for the legal issue the BIA reversed her on, she would have approved him for cancellation of removal - which would allow him to remain in the United States as a resident, even though he has removable (deportable) criminal offenses. The legal issue dealt with the federal drug laws and how they make a second simple possession offense an Aggravated Felony (which render a resident ineligible for cancellation of removal). This may seem ridiculous, but its true. At trial, we had argued that because the second possession arrest was before he had been sentenced on the first, he was not a recidivist, and therefore not an Aggravated Felon. The BIA agreed with our argument and sent it back to the Judge to consider her claim for relief from removal, now that his eligibility had been resolved. The worst part of this case for him and his family is that he is detained under the Mandatory Detention law which makes anyone with drug convictions ineligible for release on an immigration bond.
The second case we won at the BIA this week was an asylum case where there was no question that the alien suffered unspeakable abuse in her native country. I honestly can’t even describe what happened to her here - I hated making her relive it to prepare her for trial, and I don’t like thinking about it myself. However, simply suffering atrocities is not enough for asylum protections. One has to show that the abuse was at the hands of the foreign government or a group the government can not or will not control, and that it was on account of one of the enumerated grounds: race, religion, national origin, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. In her case there was also a threshold issue - asylum cases have to be filed within a year of arriving to the US. We were able to convince the BIA that because she had been unable to apply for asylum with her family, and her husband’s case listing her as a derivative was denied, she falsely believed she couldn’t file on her own. Because she filed within a few months of being told by a competent attorney that she could file on her own, the BIA found her application timely. Again, I don’t want to say too much about the facts, but the BIA also overturned the court’s decision that the horrors visited upon her were not on account of one of the enumerated grounds.
The sound of shrieking, happy clients is music to my ears. Not every case turns out like this, making the unlikely victories all the sweeter.
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