Blaine Bookey

Bookey is legal director of UC Hastings’ respected Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, where she focuses on cases advancing the cause of women, children and LGBTQ asylum seekers. Along with litigation, she gains hands-on experience with trips to the southern border, checking on the status of migrants seeking their day in U.S. courts.

“I was in Mexico in March,” she said, “looking at the conditions being faced by Haitian women there,” she said. Bookey, who is also an adjunct professor at the school, speaks Haitian Creole and teaches courses on human rights and the rule of law in Haiti.

Border circumstances are deplorable, she said, for the women she visited and more broadly for the more than 60,000 refugees whom the U.S. government has rejected for entry. “They’re living in horrible conditions, languishing while unable to prepare their [asylum] claims. Only about five percent are represented, compared with the 30 percent or so who have attorneys in U.S. immigration courts.”

In August, Bookey scored a major win for women asylum-seekers with claims based on their status as alleged victims of domestic violence in a case at the center of a lengthy battle over the issue. A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel held, 2-1, that the Board of Immigration Appeals was misinterpreting a major decision by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a case known as Matter of A-B-, as a “categorical bar” on domestic violence-based asylum claims.

Bookey explained that refugee survivors of domestic violence had been among the first targets of the Trump administration’s assault on the U.S. asylum system and the Matter of A-B- opinion had been used wrongly to aid government lawyers in denying asylum in such cases across the board.

But in an Aug. 7, 2020 opinion, the circuit overruled the immigration appeals board and held that an indigenous Guatemalan woman, Sontos Maudilia Diaz-Reynoso, must get another hearing on her asylum claim based on alleged domestic violence by her common-law husband and a credible fear of persecution. Diaz-Reynoso v. Barr, 2020 DJDAR 8272 (9th Cir., filed Oct. 18, 2018).

Bookey argued and the panel majority agreed that despite Sessions’ hostile attitude to asylum claims in general, the attorney general’s instructions to the Board of Immigration Appeals were to analyze asylum claims on a case-by-case basis, not bar them altogether.

“The decision has already been applied in other cases,” Bookey said. “And the same panel had two similar cases and they have been remanded” for further examination of the applicants’ claims.

— John Roemer