An American Bar Endowment grant that was awarded to Georgia State University College of Law’s Immigration Clinic is proving to have a big impact on the lives of asylum seekers in Georgia.
In July 2021, the clinic started on the Work Authorization Defense Project. Funded through the ABE grant, the goal is to file lawsuits in federal district court fighting for noncitizens who have been unlawfully denied work permits. Since the project started, the clinic has filed five lawsuits. Four have settled and one remains pending. The four settled suits resulted in the issuance of five work-permit cards that were previously denied.
“The Work Authorization Defense Project has enabled us to bring much-needed resources to the cause of asylum seekers who have been wrongfully denied employment authorization,” said Immigration Clinic Director Emily Torstveit Ngara. “Being able to work, support their families, and afford an attorney is vital to their ability to exercise their right to apply for asylum protections.”
The process for asylum seekers to apply for a work permit is handled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). To receive work authorization, asylum seekers generally must wait 150 days from the date they filed for asylum before submitting their work-permit application. Thirty additional days are added to account for USCIS processing time.
“Given that asylum seekers by definition are fleeing persecution in their home countries, most arrive with the proverbial shirt on their back,” said Immigration Clinic Supervising Attorney Will Miller. “Work authorization is critical to surviving in the United States while they spend multiple years awaiting a decision on their asylum application.”
It’s common, however, for USCIS to deny work authorization arbitrarily, whether as the result of a clerical error or a miscalculation of the 180-day wait period. If the work-authorization application is denied, there is no process for the asylum seeker to appeal.
“For many years now, USCIS has regularly issued these arbitrary denials of asylum seekers’ applications for work permits,” Miller said. “Sometimes it may seem like it’s in bad faith but most often it's just clerical errors. So, the whole point of our project is to take this out of the agency level and bring it to the light of day in the federal courts. We sue USCIS.”
The grant funding allows for the Immigration Clinic to file a total of 10 lawsuits in federal court. Miller said finding the remaining five cases won’t be difficult because of how common these denials are. The clinic also has the help of lawyers from Kilpatrick Townsend, Troutman Pepper and Alston & Bird.
“I think it’s great these impressive litigators dropped what they were doing to help us on these cases,” Miller said. “They aren’t billing for these clients or making any money. The most recent case was a single mom who lives in LaGrange and lost her job because her work permit was in the process of being revoked, and they took it very seriously.”
The College of Law opened the Immigration Clinic in January of 2020 to help asylum seekers through their many legal challenges. In Atlanta, asylum seekers experience about a 97 percent asylum denial rate. Students in the clinic are equipped with the skills to address the need for more immigration attorneys in the metro Atlanta area—and to begin addressing the state’s 58,000 pending immigration cases.
Written by Mara Thompson