Lady and her two boys!
For our client of the month for May we have a perfect Client for Mother’s Day! Here we celebrate a woman who did what mothers do best- protect her children and create a better life for them. We are happy to share that Lady and her sons, Diego and Juan, were granted asylum! Ava Benach represented them before the immigration court in New York. 
Azeb and Dree Collopy
We are happy to once again begin our client of the month series with a Dree Collopy victory! This month, we celebrate our client Azeb, who was granted asylum from Ethiopia after a long battle to obtain the safety in this country that she deserves. Azeb fled to the US after she had been wrongfully imprisoned in Ethiopia for standing up to government harm to journalists and political opponents. 
Hours before he takes the oath of office, President-Elect Joe Biden released details of the immigration bill his administration will send to Congress. The fact sheet distributed by his office reveals a bold bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the US, with priority for Dreamers, TPS holders and immigrant farmworkers. The bill seeks to make more visas available and expand migration opportunities for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics graduates. 
Outstanding reporting by Tanvi Misra in Roll Call last week uncovered memos that state that U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service has “stopped” processing applications for residence. While we have not seen the memos at issue, we are going to try to piece together what it means. In our opinion, it is not as nefarious as it seems, though it sure is bad.
Let’s start with this basic premise: this administration is resolutely and completely anti-immigrant. 
We have heard a lot about the “Caravan” of immigrants making its way north through Mexico from the Northern Triangle- El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala- of Central America. Once numbering over 1200 people, the remaining 150-200 members Caravan arrived at the U.S. border to request refuge in the United States. When they got there, they were told that the U.S. was full. There was not even a manger to house them. 
The Benach Collopy Asylum Summer Fellowship 2017
I have been so lucky to get to know so many brave, hard-working, family-oriented, and generous people from all over the globe. They all shared one thing in common: a willingness to take a chance to come to the U.S. to be the person they knew they were meant to be.
-Ava Benach
Description of Fellowship
Surging violence against transgender and gender nonconforming communities worldwide continue to force a record number of individuals to seek protection at U.S. 
Back in November, we made some predictions about what might occur in a Trump presidency as it relates to immigration. Generally, we were very pessimistic and presumed that almost all areas of immigration would become more difficult and challenging for immigrants, families and communities. This has proven to be true, but not in all of the ways we anticipated. In some areas, such as refugees and admission policies, the administration has been as bad as expected. 
Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I am thinking about the M.S. St. Louis. In 1939, while war waged in Europe, the M.S. St. Louis, a transatlantic ship carrying Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich, reached U.S. waters by way of Hamburg and Havana. Seeking protection from persecution and a safe place to start over with their families, these refugees hoped to be admitted to the United States of America.