A pair of clinics at Columbia Law School and New York University School of Law won asylum for their respective clients in two recent immigration proceedings. A team of students working in Columbia Law’s Sexuality and Gender Clinic secured a grant of asylum from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Dec. 31 for a gay man who left his home country of Honduras three years ago after persecution based on his sexual orientation. In Honduras, the man and his partner were kidnapped and his partner murdered before he fled to the United States.
Immigrant Equality, a national nonprofit focused on immigration rights for LGBT and HIV-positive individuals, referred the case to the Columbia Law clinic last fall. Students A.J. Garcia, Michael Ruthenberg-Marshall, Kimber Hargrove and Matheus Oriolo, under the supervision of clinic director and professor Suzanne Goldberg, spent the next few months filing legal briefs and preparing their client for a December interview with an asylum officer.
