By Lauren Smiley
Usually SF Weekly lets its stories speak for themselves, yet the op-ed in the Guardian attacking my "Border Crossers" cover story last week -- comparing me to Jerry Springer and the Weekly to the National Enquirer -- calls for a response.
My story took a critical yet sensitive look at a quirk in the asylum system: that transgender immigrant women locally and nationwide have succeeded in winning asylum despite the fact that many have prior prostitution arrests on their records,
Unscrupulous attorneys prey on immigrants seeking green cards with an expensive and fruitless legal scheme. Now 29 Mexicans have joined the disbarment case against one such lawyer.
In a landmark case, Amanda DuValle, allegedly brutalized in Nicaragua because she is a transsexual, escaped deportation from the U.S. by invoking the U.N. Convention Against Torture. But if she won, why is she still in jail?
What happens when judges' job burnout level gets too high? You don't want to know.According to a just-published survey of 96 U.S. immigration judges, the men and women deciding delicate asylum cases are stressed and burned-out to the point that the term "asylum" begins to have unpleasant connotations. The U.C. San Francisco study claims that judges are rampantly suffering from "secondary traumatic stress" and job burnout -- at higher levels than prison wardens or hospital doctors -- and this aff
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has paved the way for battered women from countries where such abuse is widely accepted to be granted asylum in the United States. The DHS declared its opinion in a court filing of an asylum case of a Mexican woman only referred as L.R., who was denied by a San Francisco-based immigration judge some years back. The filing advocates that the case be further examined by the asylum appellate body, the Board of Immigration Appeals. San Francisco's star
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