Tahirih is pleased to share with you the news that our client Daniela* was recently granted asylum after a long, trying journey. Daniela’s success would not have been possible without a collaborative effort between attorneys in Tahirih’s Washington, DC area and Houston offices, and a team of pro bono attorneys at Mayer Brown LLP.
Daniela is [...]
My husband accused me of saying prayers to harm his business and told me that my religion disturbed every part of his life. Whenever I returned home from church service, Jean was waiting for me. He whipped me with a belt many times and once, he even threatened me with a hammer. He told me he would kill me.
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I tried to get help. I went to our church’s marriage committee for counseling but Ndulu continued to threaten and abuse me in front of the committee, yelling “Leave me alone. If I had a gun I would kill her and nothing would happen to me!” Next I tried the police, but they told me, “Woman, that is a family affair. Go and submit to your husband.”
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Sofia*, an immigrant girl from Mexico, came home one day to find her mother lying in a pool of blood, unconscious on the floor. She had been severely beaten by her husband, Sofia’s stepfather. Although Sofia’s mother had been repeatedly abused by her husband, this time it was more severe than ever before. Sofia called [...]
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When I married Kasim, I had no idea I was in for a lifetime of misery and violence.
My parents, especially my father, showered me with love and kindness throughout my early years growing up in Saudi Arabia. Yet, Kasim was nothing like my father, and instead of the happy marriage and loving household that I [...]
They told me that worms would come out of my clitoris if I was not “excised.” I will never allow my daughter to go through the same suffering that I did.
When I was five years old, my family forced me to undergo female genital mutilation in our small village in West Africa. No girl [...]
In December 2004, my family introduced me to a man in hopes of arranging our marriage. He appeared to be a promising partner—a handsome doctor with a bright future in the United States. At the time, I had accomplished much in my professional career and was ready to get married, which is why I agreed [...]
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I married my sweetheart. We met when we were both 14 years old, just schoolchildren. He left for the United States a few years after we met and told me he intended to come back to El Salvador. But after he had gotten into enormous debt, he summoned me to join him there to help work it off.
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I always dreamed of the life I could have had, if only my father did not die when I was a baby. Unfortunately, I will never know how things could have been, because after his car accident, my life dramatically changed.
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Bianca* and her three young children fled their home in West Africa when her husband’s family was preparing to perform the ritual known as female genital mutilation on her two-year-old daughter as a “cure” for her recently diagnosed dwarfism (considered a curse by local customs).
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