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Asylum
Crimes
Date and Time:
05/15/2024 11:00am to 12:30pm PDT
Recorded Date:
05/15/2024
Place:
Online
Registration Deadline:
Wednesday, May 15, 2024 - 11:00am
MCLE:
1.5 CA & TX
Level: All

This webinar will focus on the six statutory bars to asylum. We will do an in-depth analysis of the bars: including the regulatory and common-law elements of the bars; discuss who has the burden of proof; discuss the standard of proof is; and finally discuss counterarguments that the bars do not apply.

Presenters

Aruna Sury, Senior Staff Attorney - ILRC

Aruna Sury is a Senior Staff Attorney with the ILRC’s San Francisco office. Her work focuses on removal defense, administrative and federal appeals, and immigration consequences of crimes. Through the ILRC’s Attorney of the Day program, Aruna provides legal guidance to criminal defense and immigration counsel. She regularly contributes to ILRC publications by authoring and updating content that enables practitioners to provide high quality representation to their clients. Aruna also presents ILRC trainings and CLE courses on a variety of topics.

Since obtaining her law degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, Aruna has dedicated her career to the areas of immigration and civil rights in various settings in San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. She has worked in law firm and solo practice environments as well as in non-profit and public organizations, including Washington Defender Association, University of Washington, Kids in Need of Defense, and Political Asylum Project of Austin (now American Gateways). Aruna’s personal interest is in immigrants’ due process rights, particularly the right to effective counsel and expansive access to judicial review. She has litigated numerous cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as other circuit courts.

Merle Kahn, Consulting Attorney - ILRC

Merle Kahn has been exclusively practicing immigration law for over thirty years. She has vast experience in removal defense, federal appeals, the immigration consequences of crimes, family immigration, naturalization, and humanitarian immigration such as asylum, VAWA and U visas. She provides technical assistance through the ILRC’s Attorney of the Day program mentoring and assisting public defenders, criminal defense attorneys, and nonprofit attorneys and staff with a vast array of immigration law and questions.

Since joining the ILRC as a consultant in 2023, she has contributed to several ILRC manuals including, Essentials of Asylum Law, Temporary Protected Status: Practice and Strategies, Removal Defense: Defending Immigrants in Immigration Court, and California Judges Benchbook: Domestic Violence Cases. She has authored practice advisories, presented webinars, led the ILRC 40 hour basic immigration law training, and has served as a panelist on a number of issues for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

Prior to joining the ILRC she was Of Counsel at Daniel Shanfield – Immigration Defense, PC, which she represented clients before USCIS, ICE, EOIR, and the Ninth Circuit. She is the creator and writer of Top of the Ninth, a blog about important Supreme Court, Ninth Circuit, and Board of Immigration Appeals immigration cases. She founded and directed a pro bono legal clinic for refugees and asylees through Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley (JFS) and AILA. In 2016 Merle was named an AILA Pro Bono Champion. Before entering the field of immigration law, Merle was a prosecutor for the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission for the Supreme Court of Illinois.

Merle earned her law degree from The George Washington University in Washington D.C. and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois where she majored in English and American Literature. Merle is admitted to the California Bar.