 My name is Adrienne Meneses and I am an immigration attorney as well. I work at St. Mary's Center for Legal and Social Justice in the Immigration Human Rights Clinic. I'm one of three attorneys who supervise law students who are learning the practice of immigration law. And we do an assortment of direct representation including deferred action for childhood arrivals for kids who've been here much longer than the kids we're talking about today. Also asylum and some other things as well. I should probably mention that our clinic director, Lee Tehran, is not here with us this morning because she's actually preparing for one of our most contentious asylum cases that's been in litigation for over two years involving three unaccompanied alien children from Central America. Which is actually the topic that I'm going to talk about right now, which is asylum. There's been a lot of discussion about unaccompanied alien children and their pursuits of asylum. And so I'd like to clear up a couple of the misconceptions regarding asylum and regarding the problems that people from that are crossing the southern border face when they come to the US and apply for asylum. One of the most important misconceptions is that applying for asylum is, you know, as people see in the movies where people run into embassies and have their hands in the air and request for asylum. And that really couldn't be anything further from the truth. Jonathan mentioned how important and how significant it is that migrants seeking asylum in the United States have access to lawyers who can help them review their claim. And I'm going to echo how tremendously important that is. Asylum is not a DIY project by any stretch of the law. As I walk through the various aspects of asylum, I want to remind people of a couple of things. One, in any kind of immigration proceeding and certainly including asylum, there is no right to an attorney at government expense, the way you would have if you were in a criminal defense type matter. You can afford an attorney, or if you can afford an attorney, then you can generally have one with you. But do also keep in mind that many of the people crossing the border simply can't afford attorneys or they're being warehoused in detention facilities where they can't realistically facilitate getting an attorney to them. So again, as I'm walking through this, keep in mind that most of the people that we're talking about who are applying for asylum are doing so without an attorney. However, they're opposed by a trained government attorney who is an expert in immigration law and whose job it is is to remove people from the United States. These applicants are dealing with an incredibly nuanced area of an incredibly nuanced area of law. Asylum is one of the most complicated areas of law. Immigration law is generally recognized as being second only to tax law in terms of its complexity. You're also dealing with people who have been traumatized. They've been exposed to terrific violence and they're frequently still recovering from that. Most of them have not had access to any kind of psychological services to recover from that. They're dealing with nuanced laws in a foreign language and most of them have very little education and in some cases are functionally literate in any language at all whatsoever. So you have a person in that situation opposed by this trained government lawyer in a project that should really never be attempted by themselves anyway and you can sort of imagine the outcome. It is important to remember too that and of course when you add this person being a child, you can imagine the probabilities of success. One of the misconceptions and it's really tragic. I wish it was true that I hear all the time is that asylum is widely available to people for whom bad things have happened and that's really not true. In order to be eligible for asylum, the person who's applying has to have been facing persecution as a result of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. And that's it. Just those five what they call protected classes. If you're facing persecution on one of those grounds and you may have an avenue for asylum, if it's for any other reason then asylum is simply not available to you. The burden is on the applicant to show that he or she meets all these eligibility requirements. It's not on the government to prove otherwise the way it would again in a criminal defense matter where someone has to prove you're guilty of a crime. No, you the applicant have to prove that you meet these eligibility requirements. Another misconception, and this isn't specific to asylum, this is specific I guess to broader immigration, is that words mean what they normally mean. If only words and immigration law meant what they mean in the dictionary but unfortunately they don't. It's extremely nuanced terminology and so going back to these five protected grounds, race and nationality are fairly straightforward, religion slightly less so. But let's look at membership in a particular social group and political opinion. When people hear social group, they think a softball league or a youth group and they don't describe themselves in those terms and when they think about the bad things that are happening in their lives, they don't think about it in terms of I'm being persecuted because of my membership in a social group. And so when they're being interviewed by asylum officers and they deny their membership in social groups because they don't know that's what they're talking about, then they lose their opportunity to apply for asylum on those grounds because they really don't know what the asylum officers talking about. So for instance, these are two social groups, I'm going to tweak the names here a little bit obviously to protect the confidentiality of my clients, but these are two social groups that I have used successfully in asylum cases involving unaccompanied kids. Number one, unprotected Mexican children in a nuclear family or imputed nuclear family of women who have had a domestic relationship with Jonathan Ryan. Now, I would hazard guess that applicants are unlikely to describe themselves in those terms when asylum officers ask, have you been persecuted on account of your membership in a particular social group? But that's what the law is asking for. Another one, unprotected Mexican children in a nuclear family or imputed nuclear family of individuals involved in Mexican drug dealing or drug trafficking activities who have acted in a manner inconsistent with their cartel gang supervisors or associates or rivals. So you can see why it's so crucial that these applicants have access to lawyers who, like myself or better or worse, have taken this on as our chosen field of practice and who know how to frame these claims. If you listen to what I was talking about, those are fairly common claims of domestic violence in the home and fear of cartel gang violence when you have family members that are involved, but how you frame that fear and how you frame who's going to hurt you, and most critically, how you frame why that person is going to harm you is vitally important to the ultimate success of your asylum application. And again, it's incredibly important that you have a lawyer or some other kind of legal representative to at least explain this process to you and what this terminology means. So basically running through the timeline of an individual who's apprehended in the United States and then seeks to apply for asylum, when an adult, we'll talk about children in a second, when adult is apprehended in the United States, if she or he gives any indication at all that she has a fear of returning to her home country or intends to apply for asylum, she's supposed to get what's called a credible fear interview with an asylum officer. If in that interview she's able to articulate that she has a credible fear of return, I'll talk about that again in a second, she's supposed to have an opportunity to present her case to an immigration judge who will ultimately decide whether or not she meets the definition of refugee and is eligible and deserving of asylum in the United States. Now, this credible fear interview, she doesn't have to prove her case at this point, just establish that she has a credible fear of return. She's credible, she's believable, and she's articulating a fear that could, has a significant possibility of providing the grounds for a successful asylum case. That's all you have to do at the credible fear interview phase to get your case taken before a judge. That doesn't mean it's granted. That just gives you the opportunity for your day in court. The way it's supposed to work is that trained asylum officers are supposed to conduct these interviews in a non-adversarial setting with only the persons that the applicant wants present, and that could include a lawyer. The officer is supposed to ask as many probing questions as necessary to ferret out those claims like those ones I was just describing to elicit all the information that he or she needs to make an honest, unbiased, unprejudiced determination about this person's claim. And if the applicant is too exhausted or sick or traumatized, then they're supposed to reschedule the interview to a time when the applicant can have a reasonable conversation with that asylum officer to present his or her case. And if the asylum officer still doesn't find that the applicant has a credible fear, then the asylum officer is supposed to allow the applicant to discuss his or her claim again with the judge, and then the judge will decide whether or not the applicant gets a full hearing. That's the way it's supposed to work. And overall, 77% of asylum seekers generally pass the credible fear interview stage. Again, that doesn't mean that they win their cases far from it. That just means that they get their day in court before a judge. Unaccompanied kids are handled differently. Unless they're from Mexico or Canada, regardless of whether they express a fear of return, they're given an opportunity to present their case to an immigration judge. And that's where organizations like RAISIS come in and are so vitally important because our lawyers are able to come in and talk with kids. And they have years and years of experience dealing with traumatized children who maybe don't come up and say, I'm a member of an imputed or nuclear family of women that may or may not have had a domestic relationship with some guy. You have an opportunity to talk to attorneys and talk to experts who can help you develop this. The law that Jonathan was talking about possibly being overturned, the TVPRA, is so important for child asylum seekers because it gives them an opportunity to present their claims. And the credible fear interview process is important for adult asylum seekers because it gives them an opportunity to articulate their claims. Unfortunately, right now, adults are being directed to specific detention facilities where they are being rushed through the credible fear process. They are given no notice that the interview is about to happen. A lot of times they're asked confusing questions like, are you a member of a particular social group with no explanation at all of what those questions mean? They're required to have these interviews in the presence of their children, which means that they're often required to describe horrible physical and often sexual violence in front of their children and in front of other people as well. Often these interviews happen with no access to legal counsel in advance and frequently they're over the phone. They're not even sending actual people down to look these people in the eye and have a reasonable conversation with them. And so as you can imagine, the percentage of people that are passing the credible fear stage and moving on just to your day in court in these facilities is less than 35% on average. I've got very little time left, so I want to rush ahead to just quickly some statistical numbers about the number of asylum seekers versus the number of people who ultimately, once you get your day in court, these aren't rosy statistics, once you get your day in court of the 2,895 Guatemalans that had an asylum hearing before a judge in 2012, only 222 were granted asylum. Of the 2,900 Salvadorians that requested asylum, only 191 were granted. Of the 1,200 Hondurans that applied for asylum, 93 were granted. Of the 9,206 Mexicans that applied for asylum in front of an immigration judge in 2012, 126 were granted. So we're not talking about high statistics. We're only looking for fairness so that people can get to their shot in court where in fairness they don't have a very good shot. As Jonathan mentioned, this is the law. And these are fellow citizens of the world. They have gone through horrors that, frankly, most of us can't imagine and wouldn't care to imagine. And it is the very least that we can do as a decent nation. And the very minimum, frankly, required by law to allow them a reasonable chance to describe those horrors and to ask for the assistance that the law guarantees. Thanks.