Law Commons^™

Asylum Under Attack: Restoring Asylum Protections In The United States, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

The U.S. asylum system has endured four years of systematic attack. The Trump Administration attempted to dismantle the United States’ system to protect asylum seekers through changes to case law, executive orders, presidential proclamations, internal agency guidance and sweeping regulatory changes, among other measures. The system largely ground to a halt after the Trump Administration co-opted the coronavirus public health crisis to effectively close the southern border to asylum seekers with its March 2020 Centers for Disease Control order. This catastrophic order was not even the last in a long line of the Trump Administration’s efforts since assuming power to …

Telling Refugee Stories: Trauma, Credibility, And The Adversarial Adjudication Of Claims For Asylum, Stephen Paskey

Journal Articles

When trauma survivors seek asylum in the United States, the deck is stacked against them. In most cases, the applicant’s story is the only direct evidence of the applicant’s claim, and asylum is certain to be denied if a judge finds the applicant not credible. But the stories told by trauma survivors defy cultural norms for a credible story: they are often inconsistent, vague, and both logically and chronologically disjointed. As a result, asylum may be wrongly denied. The problem is inherent in our asylum adjudication system, which subjects most applicants to an adversarial hearing.

This article uses scholarship on …