Feb 27, 2023
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The President signed H.R.700 into law on December 19th, 2022
Sunlight's Web Integrity Project says as many as 26 documents for Training of Asylum Officers were pulled from USCIS's main pages and "cannot be found anywhere else on the site."
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has pulled offline hundreds of pages of documents providing insight into the country's asylum process and practices since President Donald Trump took office, the Sunlight Foundation, a government transparency watchdog, has said.
According to Sunlight's Web Integrity Project, as many as 26 documents for Training of Asylum Officers were pulled from the USCIS's main website between March and April 2017 and "cannot be found anywhere else on the site."
Sunlight acknowledge that eight of the manuals had been relocated to the agency's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) "reading room," but said the decision to take down pages that many immigration lawyers rely on and move others without any notice has created confusion for those who rely on the resources.
"Their actions, intentional or not, have made it more difficult for those looking to train asylum officers or who are asylum officers themselves to access this information and that potentially strains the relationship between the agency and those who would like to get this information," Toly Rinberg, the director of the Web Integrity Project, told Newsweek.
The organization said pages stripped from the website included information on international human rights law, a list of U.S. statutes and international agreements establishing the framework for the asylum process and a series on techniques for interviewing asylum seekers, including how to interview torture victims and how to work with interpreters.
Rinberg said Sunlight "felt compelled to tell the public about these removals" after hearing from the immigration attorney community that many had been relying on the pages.
"The asylum process is so important, and particularly important given the Trump administration's focus on stripping immigration policies," he said.
In a statement shared by the Sunlight Foundation, Victoria Neilson, an attorney for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) said some of the most useful documents removed dealt with the inner workings of the asylum process.
As someone who helps train lawyers who are new to asylum work, the documents had been an invaluable resource, Neilson said.
"They give good insight into how the asylum officers themselves are trained to interpret ambiguous areas of the law and how asylum officers are trained to conduct interviews," Neilson said. "They give us a little sense of what to expect in some situations.
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