Transition Team

When the United States pulled its final troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban’s swift takeover of the government and military sparked a humanitarian crisis that’s still reverberating. More than 100,000 Afghans fled with American help, and those who entered the United States did so on a two-year permit that expired this summer.

Many Afghan evacuees are seeking asylum and permission to stay here long term, but the process is famously difficult, creating a huge need for legal expertise. Enter Berkeley Law’s Asylum Law Practicum, whose students helped Bay Area Afghan evacuees submit asylum applications under the supervision of lawyers from Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay, which has resettled more than 1,000 Afghans since the U.S. withdrawal.

Lecturer Kyra Lilien ’06, who directs that organization’s Immigration Legal Services Program, teaches the practicum and accompanying seminar course.

“Given the incredible number of Afghan asylum seekers who have arrived in the East Bay these last two years, the local legal service providers have been completely inundated with requests for assistance,” she says. “Many Afghans cannot access the legal assistance representation which they so desperately need.”

The practicum builds on work done by the Berkeley Law Afghanistan Project, founded in 2021 to help Afghans facing legal impediments to leaving the nation and to preserve evidence of the Taliban’s human rights abuses.

Practicum students reviewed U.S. asylum law and its roots in the 1951 Refugee Convention, then got paired with Afghan families in need of help. After multiple meetings with them to develop legal claims, the students completed full asylum applications with client declarations, personal evidence, and country reports, and also submitted letter briefs.

“The practicum provided me an opportunity that felt true to why I came to law school in the first place — to help people,” says Muhammad Yusuf Tarr ’24. “Growing up as a Muslim-American, I often saw people with faces like mine and names like mine fleeing from war-torn countries, so lending my skills to help another family through a process as arduous as asylum feels like the least that I can do.”

Practicum clients must cope with an unfamiliar legal process — including an overwhelming amount of paperwork which must be kept meticulously organized — while navigating everyday life. Tarr helped represent a family that faced an imminent threat of harm due to its prior involvement with American forces in Afghanistan, gratifying work that wound up putting them on a path to permanent status in the U.S.

“Constantly stunned” at how the practicum’s clients are able to handle past traumas and adjust to their new lives in another country, Tarr says, “While our meetings may be hard at times, just seeing the optimism that they have in such an unknowing process creates an energy that truly allows me to put my best foot forward and gives me hope in their case.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw