Hooray! We did our first mock immigration hearings for the Immigration Clinic. We were doing the direct examination of our asylum applicant and one of the expert witness. It's kind of a bizarre process of trying to elicit answers from the witness rather than just making the arguments to the judge yourself (on behalf of the client.)

[BTW, I really like my partner who I'll be working with the next two quarters. She's a super-nice, friendly TALL Romanian woman. Her only flaw being that she's a Stanford alum (and her husband too - boo) - but she's a delight to work with and way more on top of things than I am.]

Our judge granted asylum to our client, a teenage boy who was horribly abused, including forced prostitution, by his own father. Really tragic tragic story. Although we don't have his real name, this was a real case. In real life, the judge didn't grant him asylum (meaning most likely he'd be deported from the U.S. and sent back to his country) but it's currently pending an appeal.

It is neat and encouraging to talk with attorneys that do asylum work. The few that I've met just love it. One of them is a woman at my church who says it's "life-changing work." By that she meant that it really changed her perspective on her own life. That her clients were actually tortured and persecuted, that she actually knows real people who suffer the kinds of things you only hear about in the news or read in books... and that you can effect dramatically good change in their lives. (Okay, tempered by the fact that the victories tend to be rarer than the losses.) It can be powerful and heady stuff.