A new report from the Sunlight Foundation’s Web Integrity Project (WIP) has found that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services removed over two dozen PDFs for training asylum officers, which immigration attorneys say were helpful in preparing themselves and their clients for interviews, from its website. It’s part of a broader push by the Trump administration to make the asylum process more difficult.
The 26 deleted PDFs, which according to Sunlight “ran to several hundred pages,” included a guide to international human rights law, one on how to make a decision on asylum, one on gender-based claims for asylum, and a six-part series on the asylum interview process. From the report:
The materials were prepared for personnel charged with reviewing and vetting asylum claims under certain international agreements and provisions of U.S. law. An entire section titled “Asylum Officer Basic Training Course Lesson Modules,” which included links to the training documents, was removed from the “Asylum Division Training Programs” page. Although some related material can be found elsewhere on the USCIS domain, the agency did not announce the removals or create a comprehensive archive of the resources.
Read more here.
