ADVANCING DUE PROCESS FOR A FAIRER IMMIGRATION SYSTEM (Summer 2023). Around the time the Trump administration launched its attacks on the country’s immigrant communities, an 18-year-old teenager fled her home in El Salvador and journeyed to the U.S. southern border. She was seeking safety and asylum because local authorities in her town were unresponsive to her allegations of domestic physical abuse. She entered the United States only to be deported back to her native country by an immigration judge who, by not providing her with a list of pro bono attorneys, deprived her of the opportunity to assert her claims of physical violence.

Two years later in 2019, she left home again and traveled to the southern border, but an immigration judge denied her claim for asylum. After she appealed the judge’s ruling, ACLU of New Hampshire’s senior staff attorney SangYeob Kim took on her case and represented her subsequent appeal before the Board of Immigration Appeals. Despite a psychologist’s expert testimony that the young woman was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, the immigration appellate court did not believe it was significant enough to affect her asylum claim.

Seeing an opportunity to create positive caselaw, attorney Kim brought the case before the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—and won; the woman was allowed to remain in the country and pursue her claim for asylum. This ruling set a precedent that has been widely used by other asylum seekers needing a psychological assessment to prove the suffering they experienced and would continue to experience if deported.

Impact litigation, like this case, is one of the primary tools of the Immigrants’ Rights Project, the initiative launched in 2018 by the ACLU of New Hampshire, which at the same time brought on SangYeob Kim to direct it. His initial focus was securing bond hearings for the hundred plus immigrants held at the detention center operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Dover, New Hampshire.

The various lawsuits that the Project filed in the first few years—against local law enforcement, ICE, Homeland Security, the U.S. Attorney General—were mostly to protect due process rights. When the COVID-19 epidemic hit in 2020, attorney Kim along with ACLU of New Hampshire’s other attorneys and affiliated law firms, filed a lawsuit that secured the release of detained medically vulnerable individuals at ICE’s detention center in Dover. Twenty-seven immigrants were released, either voluntarily or by court order, as a result of this case.

In the last few years, the changing immigration landscape in New Hampshire, and regionally, brought a corresponding shift in the Project’s legal strategy. SangYeob’s work focused on the First Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico and Massachusetts. Of the 25 cases in which the Project has helped to secure victories before the Court, one of its most historic and impactful successes was the ruling that government, not the detained immigrant, is required to prove why an immigrant should not be released from detention.

Under SangYeob Kim’s direction and with guidance from Legal Director Gilles Bissonnette, ACLU of New Hampshire’s Immigrants’ Rights Project has built positive immigration caselaw and strengthened due process and equal protections for immigrants. They have used the rule of law to restore a degree of fairness and humanity to the nation’s immigration system.

In the image, Legal Director Gilles Bissonnette and Senior Staff Attorney SangYeob Kim before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

Clowes Fund Field(s) of Interest: Immigrant Services

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