A caller on the Immigration Answer Show is in removal proceedings with a pending I-130, and her own attorney is pushing her to file for asylum — built on “changed circumstances” she doesn’t believe in, including that one of her U.S. citizen children is autistic. She kept saying she didn’t want to. Jim Hacking told her she didn’t have to.
mic What the Attorney Says
“You have someone trying to push an asylum case on you that you don’t want to file.”
The principle is absolute. The client, not the lawyer and not the judge, decides whether to file an application for relief.
mic What the Attorney Says
“No one can make you file an asylum case.”
This is not just about comfort. A weak asylum claim filed to buy time carries hard penalties. Asylum is governed by 8 U.S.C. § 1158, which sets a one-year filing deadline with a narrow “changed circumstances” exception — and, in subsection (d)(6), provides that an applicant who knowingly files a frivolous application is permanently barred from any benefit under the immigration laws. Manufacturing a fear claim to delay a case is the exact conduct that triggers it.
Her actual problem is timing, not persecution. Her lawyer tried to terminate the removal case so she could pursue her pending I-130, the government opposed it, and the judge floated asylum as the way to keep the case alive. That is a reason to look for other options — not a reason to swear to a fear she doesn’t have. The next hearing is a master calendar date months out, which is room to work, not a deadline to panic into a filing.
The practical first step is to take control of the file. Hacking’s advice: send the attorney a written request — email and text — for a complete digital copy of the case file by a specific date, so the client can actually see what has been filed in her name. A claim cannot be submitted without her signature, and she should not sign one she doesn’t understand.
The call closed on a warning about the other direction of pressure: lawyers and notarios who promise too much. Hacking recounted a report he hadn’t independently verified, about an attorney said to be in the Seattle area who surrendered her law license rather than face an investigation — after touting a “clean” workaround to get people work authorization. The number that stopped him was the reported caseload: tens of thousands of VAWA self-petitions under 8 U.S.C. § 1154 on file from a single attorney, a volume no honest practice could carry.
mic What the Attorney Says
“When people tell you things that sound too good to be true, they usually are.”
Both halves of the episode point the same way. Whether someone is pushing you into a filing you don’t want or selling you one that sounds too easy, the decision and the file belong to you. If a case is being run on your behalf that you don’t understand — an asylum claim, a withdrawn application that keeps generating notices, or anything else — the first move is to get the paperwork in hand and read it.