Annandale attorney helps desperate women attain asylum in the U.S.

When local immigrants want to stay in the United States to escape forced marriages or brutal husbands, they often turn to Annandale attorney Janet Smith.

Smith, a sponsor of the Taste of Annandale, will be available to meet with the public at the community festival on Oct. 14.

Smith helps people who’ve exhausted all other resources. Most of her cases involve people who’ve escaped brutal situation in other countries and are seeking asylum in the United States

Now that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is being phased out by the Trump Administration, Smith is trying to find another remedy to help people with DACA status avoid deportation. Depending on the reason they left their home county, they could be eligible for asylum or temporary protective status or might have an employer willing to sponsor them, she says.

If Congress doesn’t act, the government could start deporting people with DACA status as early as March. These people were brought here as children; they had no choice. They have jobs, pay taxes, and are trying to be productive members of the community, she says. “Now all of that is in jeopardy.” 

Unaccompanied children and adults from places like Honduras and El Salvador were fleeing for their lives, Smith says. “Those countries are more dangerous than anything you can imagine.”

DACA status is only available to people who have completed their education or are in school and don’t have a criminal record. Many of them are in their 20s now and were brought here when they were 5. “They don’t know any country other than the U.S.,” she says.

Smith employs a paralegal from Peru who speaks Spanish and a legal assistant who speaks Creole to Smith’s Haitian clients, most of whom are in detention facilities and are fighting deportation.

When Smith opened her law practice in 2011, she started seeing clients trying to attain asylum. “The stories clients tell you are horror stories; the kind of things you only hear about on TV. There are places where people can’t walk out of their house safely,” she says.

One client she represented, a woman in her early 20s, had been sold into marriage by her family to a man she didn’t love in the East African country of Djibouti. He already had other wives and beat her two or three times a week.

She had been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) when she was younger, and her husband was unable to force himself on her so he opened her with a knife and left her bleeding at home alone unable to move. When a housekeeper found her the next day, she was taken to a hospital where she spent a week.

The woman somehow got a visa to the United States, where Smith was able to get her asylum. She is now safe and living in Alexandria. “FGM is a horrible thing for a woman to go through and what she went through was much worse,” Smith says. “That’s the kind of thing that makes you stay in immigration law.”

Another client, who worked for the government in Djibouti, was forced against her will to marry her boss, who was from a powerful family. Her husband beat her constantly, and she was hospitalized several times. But she couldn’t go to the police because her husband’s uncle was head of the armed forces.

Before her marriage, she had been in love with a man who worked at the same agency. When her husband found out, the man was fired and disappeared. No one ever saw him again, and Smith’s client believes her husband had him murdered.

The woman escaped to Dubai but her husband found her and threatened to kill her father unless she returned. When she got a visitor visa to come to the United States, she applied for asylum and won the right to stay here.

Most of the FGM cases Smith sees are from Nigeria. In one case, a woman who had been subject to FGM as a child was afraid her family was going to force her daughter to go through the procedure. She took her daughter and son to the United States where her case for asylum is still pending.

“It grabs your heart,” Smith says of the clients who come to her desperate to stay in the United States. She decided to specialize in immigration cases to “help people stay here and build a life for themselves and their children.”