Olga Sanchez (Colombia), Reim Kazam (Sudan), Martha Alicia (Central America), and Melei (West Africa) made heartfelt remarks on behalf of the current and former clients of the Tahirih Justice Center. They thanked these legislators who have helped Tahirih so much and gave them a real sense of the challenges that Tahirih’s clients face and have to overcome in order to build safe, peaceful lives for themselves and their children.

After enduring long and painful struggles, these women are now doing well and have renewed hope for their futures. Olga is now a professional with a software company, and supporting herself and her daughter. Melei, a dentist by training, has her own elder-care business and is also now pursuing her US dentistry accreditation. And inspired by their mothers’ experiences with Tahirih, Reim’s son and Martha’s daughter are now considering becoming lawyers themselves. Through sharing with the Congressmen these sorts of simple but meaningful steps forward, the group impressed upon the legislators how their support helps ensure that Tahirih can touch and transform the lives of many other women and families.

In addition to expressing their own gratitude, the group presented the Congressmen with hand-signed cards filled with thank-you notes like the one below from a Tahirih client who, upon being told that we were able to secure her legal status, wrote us:

“I am so happy that I dont know what to do. I have danced , danced and laughed endlessly and only pray for Tahirih Justice Center that may God give them more strengh, knowlegh and diplomacy to handle more of this cases…thanking you so much.”

The group’s visit to Capitol Hill was special in other ways as well. They also met briefly with the Chief of Staff to Congressman Al Green (who represents Houston, where Tahirih has opened a new office). And in an exciting turn of events, the Congressmen were unexpectedly called to the House floor for votes, so staffers escorted the group to meet with the Congressmen right outside the voting chamber.

As they waited, the group saw at least a dozen other legislators bustle about House business, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They also spoke with Representatives Corrine Brown and Kendrick Meek, past Honorary Congressional Co-Chairs for Tahirih’s Benefit. In addition, staffers for Congressmen Moran and Wolf graciously gave the group a tour of the Capitol. Given their disempowering pasts, these women were especially moved to be treated like dignitaries in the seat of governmental power – among other highlights, they were thrilled to be escorted through the original Supreme Court chamber, and brought to stand on the exact same spot where the President begins his walk for the State of the Union address.

Jeanne Smoot, Tahirih’s Director of Public Policy, came with Tahirih’s Wings to Capitol Hill and reflected, “I was so proud to accompany these fine ambassadors – as I said to the Congressmen, Tahirih’s staff take inspiration every single day from the strength, dignity, and perseverance of our amazing clients, and especially from Tahirih’s Wings’ desire to uplift each other and to transform our world into a better place.”

Pictured from Left to Right: Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos; Chief Michael Dirden of the Houston Police Department; Rebecca White, CEO of the Houston Area Women’s Center; Congressman Ted Poe; Houston City Council Member Melissa Noriega; Anne Chandler of the Tahirih Justice Center; Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia

The legislation prioritizes approaches with proven efficacy such as promoting women’s economic opportunity, addressing violence against girls in school, engaging men, and working to change public attitudes. By investing in local women’s organizations overseas that are successfully working to reduce violence in their communities, I-VAWA would have a huge impact on reducing poverty – empowering millions of women in poor countries to lift themselves, their families, and their communities out of poverty.

I-VAWA was conceived and drafted by Women Thrive Worldwide, Amnesty International USA, and the Family Violence Prevention Fund with the input and support of Tahirih and a broad-based NGO coalition around the country. On January 29, 2010, Anne Chandler, the director of Tahirih’s Houston office, joined other prominent supporters of I-VAWA in Texas (pictured above) to provide remarks at an event convened by Congressman Poe to celebrate the launch of I-VAWA. Tahirih’s Houston office has participated in many other important outreach and awareness-raising events this past quarter, and looks forward to continuing to build strong partnerships in the Houston NGO and service-provider community for the benefit of Tahirih’s clients and to advance the fight to end violence against women.

As highlighted in Tahirih’s September 2009 briefing and report, “Precarious Protection: How Unsettled Policy and Current Laws Harm Women and Girls Fleeing Persecution,” the one-year filing deadline can have devastating consequences for women and girls seeking refuge from gender-based persecution. Enacted as part of the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, the one-year filing deadline bars individuals from receiving asylum if they apply one year or more after their arrival in the United States. Following Tahirih’s briefing and report release, all three legislators reached out to Tahirih expressing particular concern over the one-year bar, and their offices have worked with Tahirih, together with Human Rights First and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (at UC Hastings School of Law), to better understand the problem and craft a solution.

Although this arbitrary deadline impacts all those seeking protection in the United States, women asylum seekers—especially those who fled or fear domestic violence, female genital mutilation, honor crimes and other forms of gender-based persecution in their home countries—often face particular complications that delay their applications for protection and place them at greater risk of being denied asylum due to the one-year bar. [For more information about the impact of the one-year filing deadline on women and girls seeking asylum, please see pp. 31-39 of Precarious Protection.]

As Congressman Moran noted when introducing the bill, “The United States has always been a beacon of hope for refugees fleeing discrimination, whether political, religious, or gender-based. The one-year filing deadline for asylum applications is unnecessary, and its elimination will guarantee all qualified individuals have the opportunity to restart their lives free of persecution.” See Congressman Moran’s press release here.

On September 30, 2009, the Tahirih Justice Center, together with Human Rights First and the Women’s Refugee Commission, convened a Congressional Briefing to call attention to the many challenges facing women and girls seeking asylum in the United States. The Briefing offered policymakers and the public a critical opportunity to learn about the harmful impact of unsettled policy and current immigration laws on women and girls fleeing gender-based violence.

Tahirih’s Executive Director, Layli Miller-Muro, gave opening remarks thanking attendees for their interest in increasing protection for women and girls fleeing violence. A former Tahirih client (who also served on Tahirih’s Board of Directors), Gisele, courageously recounted how she was forced to flee her home country after being arrested and beaten for resisting a forced marriage to the chief of her village. Gisele’s story about her struggles to find safety in the United States drew in the audience and gave a vitally important human face to the consequences that can result from US asylum law and policy decisions. Award-winning actor and human rights activist Sam Waterston (D.A. “Jack McCoy” on NBC’s Law & Order) and longtime Tahirih supporter Congressman Jim Moran also gave compelling remarks, reflecting on the prevalence and severity of violence against women around the world and calling for the US to improve its response to women and girls in desperate need of refuge.

Tahirih’s Director of Public Policy, Jeanne Smoot, next outlined the problematic state of gender-based asylum law in the United States, as well as the devastating consequences of a one-year filing deadline that can bar applicants, especially women and girls, from receiving asylum. Joining Jeanne on the speakers’ panel were Annie Sovcik, Policy Counsel at Human Rights First (relating the experience of women who flee persecution only to face expedited removal, i.e., deportation without a hearing, in the US), and Emily Butera, Detention Program Officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission (addressing the damaging impacts of detention on women and children who, under current US policy, can be imprisoned while they await decisions on their asylum cases).

As highlighted in the Washington Post (“Clearer Rules Urged For Asylum Seekers”), findings from a new report by the Tahirih Justice Center, “Precarious Protection: How Unsettled Policy and Current Laws Harm Women and Girls Fleeing Persecution,” were also presented at the Congressional Briefing.

Drawing on the compelling stories of Tahirih’s clients and our direct services experiences, as well as cutting-edge research gleaned from recent reports by other organizations, Tahirih’s report represents a new level of research and analysis that has only been made possible in the last year as our public policy department has grown. The report critically examines how the lack of clarity and coherence in the field of gender-based asylum law, together with the severe implications of current immigration laws and policies of general application to all asylum seekers (including the one-year filing deadline, the expedited removal process, and restrictive detention policies with limited access to parole), can prevent women and girls fleeing persecution from finding the protection they need and deserve. Read the full report (PDF).

We are pleased and hopeful to think that through public outreach and education efforts like this recent Congressional Briefing and report, Tahirih can achieve true justice not only for one client at a time, but also, through system transformation, for all women and girls who seek safe haven in the United States.

As highlighted in the Washington Post (“Clearer Rules Urged For Asylum Seekers”), the briefing featured the presentation of Tahirih’s report, “Precarious Protection: How Unsettled Policy and Current Laws Harm Women and Girls Fleeing Persecution.”

The report takes a critical look at how the lack of clarity and coherence in the field of gender-based asylum law, together with the harsh implications of current immigration laws and policies of general application to all asylum seekers (including the one-year filing deadline, the expedited removal process, and restrictive detention policies with limited access to parole), can prevent women and girls fleeing persecution from finding the protection they need and deserve. Read the full report (PDF).

Tahirih is serving on the Immigration Committee of the VAWA IV National Task Force and is helping to collect input from our colleague service-providers around the country, as well as from Tahirih’s own staff and our extensive Pro Bono Attorney Network (with over 650 lawyers from 110 firms).

Our Approach

For more on the strength and importance of the direct services & policy model, please see Director of Public Policy, Jeanne Smoot’s article “Advocacy on a Shoestring.”

Our work on VAWA’s reauthorization has underscored the vital importance of our combination of direct services and public policy advocacy. Tahirih’s unique organizational model ensures that challenges posed to individual immigrant survivors can be translated into proposals for lasting systemic reform, so that laws, implementing regulations, and agency protocols all become more powerful and coordinated mechanisms for protection. Specific proposals we will make as part of the VAWA IV National Task Force include:

• US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) should be required to engage in expedited processing of visa petitions for battered immigrants, given how precarious their situation often is until they receive their approvals. USCIS has set a nominal goal time of five months for processing VAWA self-petitions, but in Tahirih’s experience, processing times can stretch to 18 months or even longer. In that interim, many of our clients are not entitled to work authorization. The ripple effects of this chronic legal, physical, and psychological uncertainty are profound. Among other things, it can be extremely challenging for our clients to find a safe place to live, particularly when domestic violence shelters often only permit stays of up to 30 days and long-term shelters (transitional housing) often require residents to work.
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be prevented from deporting victims with a pending U visa petition (a type of visa available to non-citizen victims of certain serious crimes who cooperate with the police). Currently, ICE has the power to grant stays of removal (an order preventing deportation) to U visa petitioners, but does not always exercise it. In a particularly egregious case, ICE refused to grant a stay and deported Tahirih client and her small child back to her home country on the same plane as her abuser. Given this disturbing lack of sensitivity to basic safety concerns, ICE should be legally restrained from deporting these vulnerable victims.
• Procedural regulations need to keep pace with changes in VAWA to ensure that victims get the full benefit of those improvements. Important new provisions were added to VAWA in 2006. For example, while human trafficking victims are typically required to cooperate with law enforcement investigations and prosecutions, VAWA III provided that they could be exempted from doing so if the experience would be too traumatic. This humanitarian provision was included to acknowledge not only how painful it is for victims to relive their experiences as witnesses, but also that victims’ cooperation can place themselves and their families at grave risk of retaliation from the trafficker’s criminal network. Unfortunately, because no regulations have been issued that clarify how to prove that trauma, what kind of application to prepare to get the exemption, and where even to file it, we are unaware of any instance in which this vital exemption has actually been used.

In addition to the above, Tahirih is also developing a number of proposals specifically regarding the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), legislation incorporated in VAWA III that Tahirih helped draft and champion to protect so-called “mail-order brides” from abuse and exploitation. Among other priorities, we hope to clarify and strengthen IMBRA to ensure that the government puts a comprehensive enforcement regime in place—including technical assistance to international marriage brokers (IMBs) on their obligations, a hotline for women to report non-compliant IMBs and get referrals to domestic violence service-providers, the capacity to conduct investigations and bring prosecutions—as well as to specify which government offices should be assigned those responsibilities.

We look forward to continuing this work in the coming years and making exciting progress with our coalition partners toward realizing the full potential of all federal laws intended to protect vulnerable immigrants from abuse.

Before and after introduction, Tahirih worked hard to build a broad base of support for SB 1436, including outreach to new faith-based and law enforcement allies. The bill was off to a strong start, with a favorable referral from the Senate Courts of Justice Committee followed by unanimous passage by the full Senate. However, when SB 1436 crossed over for consideration by the House of Delegates, the Speaker unexpectedly assigned the bill away from the House Courts of Justice Committee (House Courts). House Courts had held a hearing just last year on a similar bill, SB 441, and passed it (SB 441 fell short of passage by the full House by only six votes, so we had high hopes to carry the bill over the finish line this year).

A last-minute scheduling of a subcommittee hearing on the bill at 7:30am prevented testimony by some key police witnesses.

We had laid years of groundwork before House Courts and had developed solid bi-partisan support. Five co-patrons of the bill sat on House Courts, including the chair of House Courts and the chair of a key subcommittee. The referral of SB 1436 away from House Courts stacked the odds against the bill’s further progress. An additional obstacle was the last-minute scheduling of a subcommittee hearing on the bill at 7:30am, which prevented testimony by some key police witnesses.

Despite the early hour, we were grateful for a very strong showing of support from allies around the state—from the Richmond Police Department, the Virginia Organizing Project, VSDVAA, the Virginia Interfaith Center, the Virginia Coalition of Latino Organizations, the Virginia Poverty Law Center, as well as the Tahirih Justice Center. Many others who could not make the hearing, including Fairfax County Police Chief Dave Rohrer and Alexandria Police Captain Eddie Reyes, made calls, wrote letters, or sent emails encouraging passage of the bill.

Still, on February 19, 2009, the subcommittee voted against the bill. This decision prevented SB 1436 from reaching the full House for a floor vote, and ended our hope for the bill’s passage during this legislative session.

Although SB 1436 will not move forward this year, an incredible and growing coalition is mobilized to advocate for this legislation in the future. Thank you again to the many organizations and individuals who stepped up in support of SB 1436. While we are deeply disappointed by the turn of events this year, we plan on redoubling our efforts to get this vitally important bill passed during the next legislative session!

This ongoing issue highlights Tahirih’s three-part approach to protect immigrant women and girls fleeing gender-based violence. Along with the public education and public policy intiatives described above, Tahirih continues to provide legal services to directly serve the clients we have seen affected by increased immigration enforcement (see full article).

Over the course of four days in September, the US Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, has opened the door for the Board of Immigration Appeals to fundamentally alter a woman’s ability to claim asylum in the United States based on gender-based persecution. The Board of Immigration Appeals, a part of the Department of Justice and the highest immigration court in the country, is responsible for deciding cases that become the national standard for when someone is eligible for asylum. As the head of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General can direct the Board to refer a case to him, allowing him to hand down his own decision. It is through this process that the Attorney General has issued two decisions, one related to female genital mutilation (FGM) and one related to domestic violence, which are likely to impact the ability of Tahirih’s clients to make asylum claims and to remain in the United States.

On September 22, 2008, the Attorney General issued a decision effectively ordering the Board to redecide Matter of A-T-. The Board’s decision, now in question, is devastating for women who have been victims of FGM. In A-T-, the Board found that a twenty-eight year old woman from Mali was not eligible for asylum based on the FGM, which she had suffered in the past, because the procedure would not be performed on her again in the future. The Board also concluded that the FGM she endured was not related to her fear of being forcibly married to her cousin, if she returned to Mali. The Attorney General ordered the Board to reconsider their decision. In his own decision, the Attorney General chastised the Board and properly concluded that FGM can, and frequently is, performed more than once on a woman and that the harm which an asylum applicant fears in the future does not have to be identical to the harm which she has already suffered.

Recently, Alice*, a Tahirih client, was granted asylum on facts very similar to those in A-T-. Alice, a forty-two year old woman from Burkina Faso, was circumcised first at the age of five in a brutal ceremony. She was taken to a small village with fifty other girls and then held down by four women while she was cut with a scalpel. Alice was cut again when she was fifteen years old. Because of these procedures, she suffered emotional and physical harm, including two miscarriages and two stillborn births, and she feared that her own daughter would fall victim to the same procedure. The US government granted Alice asylum, allowing her and her daughter to remain in the United States. As directed by the Attorney General, the Board should correct their mistakes in the Matter of A-T- decision in order for other women like Alice to also be eligible for asylum in the future.

Three days after his decision in Matter of A-T-, on September 25, 2008, the Attorney General issued a second decision ordering the Board to decide an asylum case based on domestic violence, known as Matter of R-A-. The applicant in that case, Rodi Alvarado Pena, came to the United States from Guatemala fleeing a decade of severe abuse by her husband, a former soldier. In 1999, the Board denied asylum to Ms. Alvarado, and her case has bounced back and forth between the Board and multiple Attorneys General for nine years, awaiting the finalization of regulations that are in favor of gender-based asylum. With his September 25 decision, Attorney General Mukasey ordered the Board to issue a final decision in the case “establishing a uniform standard nationwide.” This decision will determine if and when a woman is eligible for asylum because of domestic violence. Because the Board’s last decision in the case concluded that domestic violence was not a form of persecution, and because the gender-based asylum regulations are still not final, advocates are fearful that the new decision will deny protection to women fleeing domestic violence.

Again, only weeks after the Attorney General issued a decision in R-A-, Marie,* a Tahirih client, had her case granted by an immigration judge on facts nearly identical to those in Ms. Alvarado’s case. Our client, a thirty-six year old woman, also fled more than a decade of abuse in Guatemala by her common law husband who, like Ms. Alvarado’s abuser, was also a former soldier. The immigration judge concluded that the abuse Marie suffered in Guatemala was, in fact, persecution, and granted her case, allowing her to stay in the United States. If the Board follows their previous decision in Matter of R-A-, which the Attorney General’s opinion permits them to do, women like Ms. Alvarado and our client Marie, could be deported to countries where they face unspeakable violence and where their own governments and police will not protect them.

Advocates anticipate that the Board will announce new decisions in Matter of A-T- and Matter of R-A- before the end of the year, determining whether Tahirih clients and other women like them who have suffered female genital mutilation and domestic violence will find protection in the United States in 2009.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy. Photography by Sergio Pessolano

Some of you may have seen the powerful recent New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof (“Terrorism That’s Personal,” November 30, 2008) about acid attacks and wife burnings common in parts of Asia to subjugate women and girls. The passage of I-VAWA would mean so much to women like Naeema Azar—about whom Kristof wrote—the mother of three whose husband punished her for divorcing him by attacking her with acid and leaving her face horribly disfigured. The hope that I-VAWA would offer women like Naeema and others around the world includes:

• Increased efforts to prevent violence against women during conflict and in humanitarian settings
• Increased pressure and capacity-building to find perpetrators and bring them to justice
• Support of vital services for survivors
• Increased economic and educational opportunities that would reduce the vulnerability of women at risk of violence

We need to build even stronger bipartisan support and momentum when I-VAWA is reintroduced in the newly-elected Congress in 2009. So please begin reaching out to your Representatives now to take action and help transform the lives of women and girls around the world.

I-VAWA was developed by Women Thrive Worldwide, Amnesty International USA, the Family Violence Prevention Fund and members of Congress with the help of organizational partners. It was drafted in consultation with more than 150 groups including US-based NGOs such as Tahirih, UN agencies, and 40 women’s groups across the globe