Deborah Anker

The Trump administration is on the verge of signing a “safe third country” agreement with Guatemala, sources have confirmed to the Prospect. Asylum seekers attempting to enter the United States would be forced to file in Guatemala instead, on the grounds that it would be the first “safe” country they arrived in. Because most asylum seekers are coming from the south, this would allow the U.S. to send thousands of asylum seekers at the southern border back to Guatemala, and render them ineligible to apply for refugee status in the U.S...But experts like Deborah Anker, a Harvard law professor who focuses on asylum, believe that the flow of migrants would eventually continue. She tells the Prospect: “The reality is that people will keep trying to find a way to come because it’s a life or death situation for them and their families. But the Trump administration is trying to get around this by having this agreement.”

A proposal from Senate Republicans to end the partial government shutdown includes not only the $5.7 billion President Donald Trump seeks for a border barrier with Mexico, but also landmark changes to the U.S. asylum system. It’s uncertain if the proposal — in its current form — would pass the Senate or get approval from the U.S. House of Representatives. Democratic leaders in Congress have already come out against the proposal. ... International law says that a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention/Protocol (Article 33) cannot return a refugee to a country where he or she faces persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, said Deborah Anker, a clinical professor of law, founder and director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program at Harvard Law School. "If the United States turns away people at the border, or from within the United States, it is violating the Convention/Protocol," Anker said.

Why are more immigrants trying to avoid deportation by taking sanctuary in Philly than any other major city in the U.S.? Reporters Laura Benshoff and Jeff Gammage answer that question in a two-part series on WHYY’s The Why, in partnership with The Philadelphia Inquirer. ...Asylum initially grew out of the Holocaust and the Cold War, the first underscoring the need for international human-rights protections, the second revealing a useful foreign-policy tool. Accepting the fleeing citizens of its enemies served humanitarian ends and gave America legitimate reason to gloat on the world stage. On the other hand, people running from governments friendly to the U.S. had a difficult time getting asylum, according to Deborah Anker, a law professor at the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.

President Trump said Thursday he intends to take executive action next week to end the “abuse” of the U.S. asylum system, a plan that could include “massive tent cities” at the southern border aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country...“He can’t by executive fiat repeal an act of Congress or a constitutional amendment,” said Deborah Anker, a Harvard Law School professor. “He has to ask for new legislation.”

"It often happens," says Phil Torrey, managing attorney of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program (HIRC), “that I’ll get a phone call from criminal-defense counsel somewhere random in the country, like the one last week I got from Tennessee. The lawyer says, ‘Hey, I’m about to go into the courtroom, here’s the plea deal that’s on the table—and my client’s not a U.S. citizen. What’s gonna happen?’” Torrey is addressing the four law students in his “crimmigration” clinic, who are learning how to advocate for criminal defendants who are not American citizens...In addition to its broader Immigration and Refugee Advocacy clinic, HIRC offers Torrey’s crimmigration clinic in the spring: an opportunity for students to gain direct experience working on and contributing to case law in this young field. When she co-founded HIRC in 1984, says clinical professor of law Deborah Anker, it “was at the bottom of the pile”; immigration issues were barely recognized as a subfield of law. But student interest has spiked since the 2016 election, and now, she says, the Immigration and Refugee Advocacy clinic has one of “the longest waiting lists among [HLS] clinics—about 100 students.”...As Nancy Kelly, a clinical instructor and lecturer on law, puts it, Donald Trump “ran on a platform of immigrants being criminals, and now he’s doing his best to make that a reality.”... The clinic hired a staff attorney, Jason Corral, in January 2017 to represent members of the University community; soon after, a number of additional Trump administration executive orders affected various Harvard students and staff members: the ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim countries (HIRC wrote an amicus brief challenging that order), the repeal of DACA (now under challenge in courts), and the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 400,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Nepal, and, most recently, Honduras...If the repeal proceeds without challenge, Corral says, HIRC may consider building asylum arguments for TPS holders.

Immigration attorneys in Greater Boston are scrambling this week after a decision from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned a precedent determining who is eligible for asylum in the United States. Survivors of domestic violence and gang persecution, in many cases, were considered legitimate candidates for asylum — until now. Many immigration attorneys say the attorney general's decision is devastating...Deborah Anker has been working on asylum cases with domestic violence survivors for decades. She's the founder and director of the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. Anker said the decision from Sessions is a big blow, but she believes attorneys can still prove the need for asylum in some cases. But, she said, it's going to take a lot more work. "I think we will be very careful to submit extensive country condition evidence, condition evidence about the positions of different governments regarding women, and we'll be thinking through, carefully, other grounds for protection."

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that a Salvadoran woman who came to the U.S. in 2014 to escape an abusive husband did not qualify for asylum under United States law. An immigration court had previously granted her asylum, allowing her to remain in the country legally, but Sessions reconsidered the finding, as part of a broader rethinking of whether or not victims of domestic abuse can qualify for protection under U.S. asylum law. The decision means that the U.S. can now begin to turn away tens of thousands of women who arrive in this country every year, seeking safety from violence and abuse at home. “He could be repealing sixty to seventy per cent of asylum jurisprudence,” Deborah Anker, an immigration expert at Harvard Law School, told me, speaking about Sessions, before the decision was announced. “Its ramifications are extraordinary.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is stirring panic in immigrant communities by moving to limit who can get asylum in the United States. Perhaps no one is more alarmed than one Salvadoran woman living in the Carolinas. Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship. The attorney general has been highly critical of the asylum system in recent months. Now Sessions has personally intervened in her case, questioning whether she and other crime victims deserve protection and a path to American citizenship. The attorney general has been highly critical of the asylum system in recent months...Over the years, immigration lawyers in the U.S. have argued that all sorts of people deserve asylum as persecuted members of a "particular social group." "There was a beginning of a shift, and a new awareness that women could get asylum, and that rape was a form of harm that constituted persecution," said Deborah Anker, a professor at Harvard Law School and the founding director of the Harvard Immigration Refugee Clinical program.

...Now President Donald Trump’s administration is reframing how the nation admits refugees, reducing who can come here and making it tougher to apply for protection. It is playing out not through congressional action or public announcement, but in policy tweaks and guidelines that together make up an overhaul...Sessions, in a speech last fall to the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency over the courts, criticized “case law that has expanded the concept of asylum well beyond Congressional intent —created even more incentives for illegal aliens to come here and claim a fear of return.” Deborah Anker, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in asylum, said Sessions’ office declined to identify the decision he was reviewing, initially leaving lawyers without a way to respond to his request for arguments. “It was unprecedented,” she said. “The attorney general by executive action appears to want to be overturning the statute as it relates to asylum.”