Kramer Levin Files Suit to Compel Long-Overdue Asylum Interviews

Partnering with Legal Services NYC, Kramer Levin filed a mandamus suit to compel the United States government to conduct asylum interviews for five refugees.  All five are transgender women who suffered transphobic violence and sexual assault in Mexico and now seek asylum in the United States.  While the law requires that the government conduct asylum interviews within 45 days, they have been waiting for over two years and exhausted all available administrative remedies to seek adjudication of their meritorious claims for asylum.  Due to the government’s recently enacted last-in-first-out policy for scheduling asylum interviews, which only schedules interviews for newly filed cases, the women have been stuck in a legal limbo, and it is unclear when their claims for asylum would ever be heard without intervention. The case received front page coverage in the New York Law Journal.

Kramer Levin partnered with Immigration Equality to file a similar suit in April 2019 on behalf of two refugees who had also been waiting for years for an asylum interview. The government eventually relented and held interviews for both clients, who then received asylum.  Legal Services NYC and Immigration Equality are using Kramer Levin’s papers as a model to file suits on behalf of others similarly situated.

The Kramer Levin team included Intellectual Property partner Aaron Frankel; Litigation associates Michelle Ben-David, Daniel Lennard, John M. McNulty and  Allison W. Parr; Land Use associate Sam Brill; Bankruptcy and Restructuring associate Michael Vatcher; and assistant managing attorney Samantha M. Ford. Intellectual Property paralegal Erick Ramirez assisted.