To Deport or Not to Deport. Stories From an Expert Witness (me)

Send us Fan MailI have been an expert witness in four deportation hearings.  The job of an expert witness is to given the judge reasons to permit the individual to remain in the U. S. The cases were people from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine.  The Palestinian case was the most interesting because it dealt with a stateless person.  I also want to share with you a conversation I had with an Immigration judge. Immigration Attorney Shahad Atiya commented on this podcast: "Asylum law requires people to contort their fears into categories that sometimes make no sense to the expert observer. For those reasons, for the chemist, it was better for him to be able to select a category to be discriminated against such as religion, rather than fit himself into the catch all category (membership in a particular social group, that being chemists). That category kills many cases. Religion is black and white. What is membership in a particular social group anyway? We litigate this every day. "Although you mention these cases may be in the public record, they may be because of media attention or other ways they were discovered. Generally, asylum records and asylum cases are not discoverable and cannot be FOIA’d. You kept them anonymous though anyway. "Many of the timelines you mentioned for these cases put them under the Obama presidency. This shows that asylum law and its harsh realities know no party lines. "There is a level of privilege from the clients that you were an expert witness for having entered the U.S. legally and then applied after overstaying a visa. However, the privilege quickly fails when credibility is at the center of their case. Their credibility of their claims on the fact that they presented themselves at a port of entry, they held themselves out to be tourists or students or temporary workers or visitors. They told officers they intended to leave the U.S. but all along they had the intent to file for asylum because their claims naturally rest on things they experienced prior to their entry. Had their fear started while they were here, the case would be completely different. They would have a valid fear in the opinion of an officer and thereby now AFTER experiencing such events did their intentions change from nonimmigrant to immigrant. Islam and especially Shias put a lot of emphasis on the intentions you make prior to an act.  I joke about how immigration law can be so Shia."