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Here's What To Do After You Get Your Asylum Interview Notice

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What do I do after I receive my asylum interview notice?

Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States out of our office here in St. Louis, Missouri. You know, a lot of the videos that I shoot, that we make, are based on current situations at our office, questions that come up either from clients or potential clients. We have a very interesting situation here in the office that just occurred. We have a fair number of asylum cases for clients from Iraq right now. Probably in our office, we're handling about fifteen of these, and some of them have been pending for two years or more.

Last week, we got not one, not two but three asylum interview notices for the same day, and so we are working with each of our clients to prepare them for their interview and to gather the supplemental documents that we want to submit prior to the interview. It's a very interesting time here. It's very hectic so I'm going to shoot this video as quickly as I can. Basically, I wanted to talk to you about what we do to get ready for that final interview. The one thing that we do first and foremost is we meet with our client again. We go over the statement that we submitted, so whenever we file an I-589 asylum application, we always send in a long statement from our clients detailing why they fear persecution if they return back home.

The first thing we do is we review the statement with them and we go over it line by line with them, and we do that a couple of times to make sure that they're comfortable, to refresh their recollection. As I mentioned, many of the time, these people had filed these two years or more ago. They probably haven't really read up on it or paid attention to exactly what's going on day to day in their home country so we want to prepare them for the interview because when they go to the interview, usually we don't say that much as the attorneys involved. We really want our clients to stand on their own two feet, to be able to demonstrate and explain to the officer why they feel they need asylum and protection from persecution back home.

We spend a lot of time obviously preparing the clients for that interview. The other things we do is we start gathering supplemental evidence so again the evidence that we submitted two years ago might not be timely, and especially with countries like Iraq or where things are happening quickly and sides are changing and cities are falling, all these things are important to bring up, especially as we particularize them to our client's case.

For instance, if we have a Sunni Muslim who doesn't want to join ISIS, then we're going to want to demonstrate what's happening to Sunni Muslims who don't join ISIS these days, so we want to make everything fresh and contemporary and updated, and we also want to go through and highlight all of that in the supplemental application memo so that the officer has an easy time going through the evidence and they understand why our client still feels they're going to be persecuted if they return back home.

The two big things are to prepare for the interview by going over your statement, recollecting why you feel you're going to be persecuted if you go back home, and the other one is to make sure that you're submitting supplemental evidence, updated Human Rights Watch reports, State Department Country Conditions reports and any kind of news reports that apply to the situation in your home country. The tricky thing with asylum is that you wait and wait and wait for months and years and then when you get the notice, you basically have about two weeks to get your materials together and we like to submit them ahead of time, so they're actually going out right now, as we speak, to the officer before they come to the interview.

If you have any questions about getting ready for your asylum interview or if you're thinking about applying for asylum or you're wondering whether or not you're going to be able to show a credible fear of future persecution if you return back home, be sure to give us a call at 314-961-8200 or you can email us at [email protected].

If you liked this video, be sure to click Like below and subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you get updated whenever we post new videos. Thanks a lot and we hope to see you soon. Bye, bye.

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