A Win Without Testimony

Last fall, the Immigration Clinic’s students faced this challenge as they began working with two Guatemalan children, a 9-year-old girl and 10-year-old boy, who sought asylum in the United States after several years of severe abuse by family members after their mother died.

“They were so traumatized that they had engaged in numerous acts of self-harm before coming to the United States,” Niels Frenzen, director of the Immigration Clinic, recalled. An aunt had brought them to the U.S. border with the intention of reuniting the siblings with their father, who was living and working in California’s Central Valley.

Tom Lyon's Child Interviewing Lab, parked at USC Gould

The children were detained at the border and eventually placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they were both hospitalized for psychiatric reasons. When the clinic staff got the referral for the cases, they immediately began working with the children in an attempt to keep them from being deported to Guatemala and to their abusers. But early on, Frenzen and his team faced a hurdle.

“We had a hard time talking to them about what happened,” said Jean Reisz ’05, the clinic’s Audrey Irmas Clinical Teaching Fellow. “Usually in these cases, it’s the testimony of the person seeking asylum that provides the majority of evidence to support their application. But in this case, even the most basic questions would put this little girl into a catatonic state.”

This meant that the clinic team would have to build its case with only medical and government documents and expert witnesses. For 2L Gabriela Chiriboga, a clinic student assigned to the case, this meant compiling medical documents from U.S.government entities, doctors and case workers.

“I also got an expert witness, a professor who testified how the Guatemalan government can’t and won’t protect victims of domestic violence there, especially children,” said Chiriboga. But they still needed to figure out alternate ways to present the children’s story.

That’s when Frenzen asked USC Gould colleague Prof. Tom Lyon, a leader in the field of interviewing children for abuse and criminal cases, to assist.

Lyon’s Child Interviewing Lab focuses on conducting research on child witnesses who are victims of child maltreatment or have witnessed domestic violence. They employ the techniques developed from Lyon’s research in conducting interviews with child witnesses in the field. Lyon readily agreed to take on the case, his first collaboration with the Immigration Clinic. He assigned Ambar Guzman, Lab project director, to interview the children in their native language. “It’s common in these cases for children to be afraid or ashamed to disclose details of what happened to them, but we have developed techniques that encourage them. We focus on building a rapport to get kids to produce more and better information,” Lyon said.

Prof. Tom Lyon was asked to help with an immigration case involving traumatized children who needed to prepare testimony for their asylum interview.

In December 2014, Guzman interviewed the children inside the Lab’s customized van — retro-fitted to mimic an interviewing room and equipped with a separate observation area — parked outside USC Gould. “In the end, the girl did disclose some details, but she was my first interviewee who broke down during an interview,” said Guzman.

Fearing that any further questions would harm the children, Reisz and the Immigration Clinic students sought ways to substantiate that the children should not be questioned by an asylum officer or immigration judge about their abuse in Guatemala. It was Chiriboga’s task to submit the asylum application to the San Francisco Asylum Office. “We had such substantial medical records and so much information that supported our case that the children obviously could not go back to Guatemala,” said Chiriboga.

In October, the Immigration Clinic team represented the father and his children in an interview with an asylum officer in San Francisco to determine their status.

According to Reisz, after interviewing the father extensively and briefly talking with the boy, the asylum officer did something unusual. “He spoke to the girl and told her that she was going to be able to stay with her dad, who loves her very much.”

“Then, he said: ‘Welcome to the United States.’” In December, the family received official letters granting the children asylum.

This story was originally published in USC Gould's newsletter: Clinical Perspectives.

Update: Jean Reisz and the USC Immigration Clinic are currently working with the USC School of Social Work to pair MSW candidates with their clients to do assessments and help the children gain access to resources including counseling, school help and medical treatment.