A Day in the Life of an Immigration Lawyer… Pooja Asnani

Starting today, Immigrant ARC will begin a new series of blog posts interspersed throughout the year featuring legal representatives working in our member organizations. These are some of the frontline workers of the immigration world, fighting around the clock to defend our communities and keep a measure of justice alive for all those who seek to call America home.

Pooja Asnani is director of the Immigration Project at Sanctuary for Families, a New York collective that provides services to survivors of gender-based violence and abuse. She graduated from the University of Miami and got her J.D. from NYU. She was recently interviewed by Ben Rotko, a writer with the Immigrant Advocates Response Collaborative. The following is an edited transcript.

Ben Rotko: What made you want to get into immigration law?

Pooja Asnani: I immigrated to the United States when I was 12 years old from Nigeria, that’s where I grew up. My parents are also immigrants and they moved to Africa from India. Originally, my grandparents and their parents lived in this place in Pakistan called Sindh, before the independence of India and the partition between India and Pakistan.

And so, because we were Hindus living in Pakistan, there was a lot of strife and violence, and many people were displaced including my grandparents and their parents.

BR: You mostly work with people fleeing abuse, domestic violence, things like that. How is the "immigration infrastructure" equipped to provide relief to people fleeing abuse and violence.

Pooja Asnani: There’s the asylum system, which was put into place right after World War II, that provides relief and protection to individuals fleeing violence in their home country. And then in addition to that, you’ve got more recent protections that were created by United States law, including the Violence Against Women Act, which provides a mechanism by which they can apply for status on their own without needing the involvement or even knowledge of their abusive spouse.

BR: Sometimes it seems like the government is making it intentionally harder for people to go through these channels, that the process is intentionally made as long and arduous and difficult as possible to dissuade people from trying to go through it.

Pooja Asnani: These systems are run by governmental agencies, which are bureaucracies, and they can take a long time. They have their own set of funding issues. They might just not have enough staff. That has always been the case that immigration applications take longer to adjudicate than any of us would like, and that there are human beings adjudicating these cases in ways that we many times think are unfair.

What we have seen is a very, very specific and targeted shift in this cruelty that you described. It no longer appears to be this benign bureaucratic inefficiency, but rather a deliberate goal of delaying and rejecting applications, sometimes based on the most trivial errors, and therefore denying very important, substantive protections that the applicant would have otherwise had access to.

BR: You’ve talked about this shift, there’s this major focus on immigration in the larger conversation and a huge cultural shift on the political right in how immigration is viewed as an issue. This greater cultural shift, how has that affected your work on a day-to-day basis?

Pooja Asnani: It has been the case for a very long time the Democrats have tended to be more pro-immigration while Republicans have been more anti-immigration. That’s just been a general trend, but the reasons behind the justifications behind each party’s inclinations have always supposedly been rooted in economics. It has never had to do with “We don’t want brown people to come into the country.” And Trump, with zero shame, at the start of his campaign talked about Mexicans being rapists and murderers. He talks about “shithole countries.” It has become explicitly clear that racism has been a lot of the underlying cultural foundation for some of these anti-immigrant policies, that were masked in other political discussions.

Now that they have labeled their racism for what it is, the immigration debate has exploded on this national level where it is now triggering all of these feelings in people on both sides, so people are talking about it more.

And I actually think that in many ways it is moved the culture in some positive direction where, we are seeing the problem for what it is, it’s not about economics, because the figures don’t support that.

It really is about, “We are afraid that this country is going to turn brown.”

BR: Does it feel more intense now than it did when you started 10 years ago?

Pooja Asnani: Oh, yeah, the consequences at stake for a client, at every stage, are so much more heightened. An immigration application, even if it’s affirmative and they’re not in immigration proceedings, carries a lot more risk. Having these conversations with our clients triggers a lot more feelings of fear and anxiety and anguish. Everything about our work has become intense in so many different ways.