The Texas A&M Immigrant Rights Clinic won an appeal to reopen the case of a client from Somalia who fears being tortured in his home country by Al-Shabaab and the government for being a Christianity convert. The case was reopened based on the condition changes in Somalia.
Texas A&M Immigrant Rights Clinic students Miranda Leach, Ruth Correa, and Caitlin Revanna, who participated in the clinic in Spring 2018, prepared the motion to reopen.
Fall 2018 semester clinic students Clarissa Dauphin, Denise Rosales, and Wesley Salazar prepared a habeas petition and complaint for the same client, which will soon be filed in federal district court to obtain his release from immigration detention. The petition and complaint allege constitutional due process violations based on deliberate indifference to his medical conditions, as well as Rehabilitation Act violations.
Professor Fatma Marouf, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic, says she and the clinic students were able to obtain an emergency stay of removal to stop his deportation the day before the flight departed.
"We will have a chance to litigate his case from scratch," said Marouf.
Marouf said, "This client is one of the 60 or so Somalis who was physically abused by immigration guards at the West Texas Detention Facility in El Paso and is included in the report we published about those abuses last spring."
The report "'I was treated like an animal,' Abuses Against African Detainees at the West Texas Detention Facility," was jointly researched and produced by students and faculty at Texas A&M University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, University of Texas School of Law Immigration Clinic, and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).
Marouf believes immigration and the international refugee crisis are among the most pressing human rights issues of our time. "We need lawyers who are creative problem-solvers and who can connect local concerns to global developments.”
Marouf is an expert in immigration law, refugee law and international human rights law.