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Should I Sue Over Asylum Delay?

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Should I file a lawsuit over my delayed asylum case?

Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri.

Hey folks, you can tell I'm back in the office. I still got my scruffy quarantine beard, but I am back in the office ready to work. Just had a nice meeting with Adela and Amany, talking about our future expansion. Our goal is to open up an office in San Diego sometime around the new year.

Anyway, in this video, we're talking about asylum and whether or not you should file a lawsuit for a delayed asylum case. Now, some of these asylum cases drag on for three or four years, it's really ridiculous.

We're seeing that more and more, and people are calling us because they know that we sue USCIS. We've sued USCIS and the State Department, totally, those two agencies together, over 650 times. We're starting to do more and more visa delay lawsuits. We're doing a lot less asylum delay lawsuits.

Now, we're still doing green card delays, when someone applied for green card based on asylum, but on the original asylum applications, we've sort of stopped filing these for the most part. We have filed a couple in the last few months, but that's only after having long conversations with our clients.

The problem is that the denial rate on asylum is so high right now. When we first started doing asylum work, the approval rate was around 48%. I have a buddy down in Houston, his name is Brian Manning. He's a former asylum officer. I saw one of his stats the other day that the asylum approval rate these days across the country is around 26%. That means three out of every four asylum cases are being denied.

Now, we all know that that's because of the President that we have, and the attorney general that we have. It's not because of any changes in the law. There haven't been any changes in the law. Our asylum laws are the same that they were when I started practicing immigration. This is just a very harsh interpretation by the Trump administration of our asylum laws, so denials have skyrocketed.

So has the backlog. We have clients, or people who contact us, who've been waiting four years, five years for their asylum case. Right now, here in September of 2020, we're telling people you should just keep waiting. Now is not the time to sue.

If we have a client who had an asylum case and they were scheduled for an interview that got rescheduled. They're like, "Should we reschedule it?" We're like, "Nope." No reason to be rushing off to the asylum office these days.

If you have a long-pending asylum case, this is the one time I'm probably going to ever tell you to not file a lawsuit. I would not file a lawsuit on a delayed asylum case, unless you're convinced that you have a slam dunk case, and I don't really know that I've ever heard of a slam dunk case. But I did file one recently for a fellow who's convinced he's going to win. In fact, we did just win a delay lawsuit for a different fellow who had applied for asylum.

So the lawsuits still work, things start moving. But the big reason why we don't want to necessarily file the lawsuit is because, unlike if your green card is denied or your citizenship case is denied, you're probably not going to deportation. But if your asylum case is denied, unless you have some independent status, you're most likely going straight to deportation.

That's a stressful event and that freaks people out. That's why we've sort of pulled away a little bit and have not been filing so many of those.

If you have questions about this, give us a call at (314) 961-8200. You can email us at [email protected].

Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. If you liked this video, we ask that you please do two things. One, share it out on social. Two, subscribe to our YouTube channel, so that you get updates whenever we make videos, just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day and a good weekend. Peace, everybody.

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