61 House Members Want to See Justice for Asylum Seekers at USCIS

TASSC and torture survivors are celebrating a major victory on the way to justice for torture survivors and other affirmative asylum seekers waiting as long as eight years for an interview with USCIS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  

 On July 27, 61 Members of Congress sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas and USCIS Director Jaddou calling on USCIS to move all asylum applicants waiting more than five years for an asylum interview to the front of the line for interviews. The letter is led by four House Democrats: Representatives Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), Jerry Nadler (New York), Pramila Jayapal (Washington State) and Richie Torres (New York). USCIS has to answer the questions posed in the letter about the dysfunctional asylum system that has forgotten about those asylum applicants whose faces you do not see in the newspapers and the nightly news. 

 Most TASSC survivors are affirmative asylum applicants who entered US legally with visas. They have a well-founded fear of future persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, like the LGBT community. Over 180,000 asylum applications are pending more than 5 years with USCIS. 

 Five survivors TASSC from the Washington DC area and New York City visited congressional offices on April 13, explaining how much they have suffered because USCIS has ignored them, focusing only on asylum seekers who recently arrived and those at the southern border. One of these five was a woman from Uganda with two daughters who was severely beaten because she stood up for LGBT people in this deeply homophobic country. 

 Here is where the letter mentions the TASSC delegation: 

 “Several of our offices have also heard directly from asylum seekers, including LGBTQI+ asylum seekers and torture survivors, who have been waiting more than seven years to be interviewed by USCIS. They shared how this long wait has retraumatized them and exacerbated mental health challenges they already faced due to the persecution they experienced in their home countries." 

 How did a small organization like TASSC manage to generate a letter like this from 61 Members of Congress? We got support from our partner organizations and almost the entire TASSC staff and interns worked ceaselessly for an entire month to encourage Members to sign-on to the letter. But most of all it was because of the survivors themselves.  They made their voices heard in the US Congress, and they got a response.  

The strong showing on this letter is not only an accomplishment for TASSC and our partners, but for the power of the survivor voice. We will make sure their voices become even stronger until USCIS changes its inhumane, unethical and inefficient policy of pushing traumatized torture survivors to the back of the asylum interview line.