Practicing Asylum

Front matter

A HANDBOOK FOR EXPERT WITNESSES IN LATIN AMERICAN GENDER- AND SEXUALITY-BASED ASYLUM CASES

PRACTICING ASYLUM

WITH A FOREWORD BY BLAINE BOOKEY

Contents

Foreword by Blaine Bookey ix Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations xvii Introduction. Expert Witnessing: A Call to Scholars 1

PART ONE. THE PROFESSIONAL IS POLITICAL: LIFE STORIES IN ASYLUM WORK 1. Thomas Davies, “I can't not do it”: Testifying to a Life of Witness 1 Elizabeth Quay Hutchison 2. Guatemalan Women's Asylum in the United States: How Legacies of Inequity Shape Gender-Based Asylum 23 M. Gabriela Torres 3. Putting Expertise to Work: Best Practices for Academic Expert Witnesses 38

PART TWO. ENHANCING EXPERTISE: LEGAL, CONCEPTUAL, AND PRACTICAL GUIDANCE FOR SCHOLAR-EXPERTS

Part Three. Learning The System: Tools For Context And Support In Asylum Work

7. History and Politics of Immigration, Refugee, and Asylum Laws and Policies in the United States Kimberly Gauderman

8. Supporting Asylum Seekers in Detention: An Immigration Attorney's Guide Natalie Hansen

9. Trauma and Support for Asylum Seekers, Legal Service Providers, and Expert Witnesses

Maria Baldini-Potermin

Appendix 1. Country Conditions Expert Affidavit/Declaration

Appendix 2. Elements to Consider in Expert Witness/Legal Service Provider Agreements

List of Contributors

Index

175 177 181

Foreword

Twenty years ago I embarked on my career in immigrant rights as a paralegal specializing in asylum cases. Since then I have had the great privilege of helping hundreds of individuals find safety in the United States. Behind each successful case is a team of lawyers, academics, doctors, and other professionals dedicated to ensuring that each person deserving of protection can meet the hefty evidentiary burden placed on them by U.S. law.

One of the first experts I collaborated with would also become one of the most memorable, Thomas M. Davies Jr. Beyond his immense passion, Professor Davies exhibited vast knowledge of the underlying conditions forcing LGBTQ+ individuals to flee. And more importantly, he possessed an exceptional ability to translate complicated concepts with complex histories to at best uneducated and at worst disinterested audiences. We worked together on dozens of cases, but one stands out. We were before the toughest immigration judge in San Francisco who rarely granted asylum to applicants. Davies’s testimony—even over the phone—had a visible impact on the judge, who granted asylum to our client, a lesbian from Central America. We had prepared our client for a loss; after hearing the result, the look of relief and calm on her face left an indelible impression on me.

Many others fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries can attribute their safety to the groundbreaking work of Professor Davies and other experts and organizations like my own, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, that support bringing scholarly expertise to bear on asylum hearings. It has been an honor being involved in the Practicing Asylum Project, resulting in this robust volume, and to support its lofty goal of increasing the availability of experts to carry on this work. It was especially moving to have the chance to meet Professor

X FOREWORD

Davies in person before his passing. I keep on my wall a letter he wrote to me after I graduated from law school and started at the Center, congratulating me and thanking me for my efforts. It is a reminder that one person can touch many lives and do it with joy, gratitude, and humility. Thank you, Professor Davies, for leading by example and inspiring a generation.

Since its inception with the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, the U.S. asylum system has faced challenges to fulfilling its promise of upholding our obligations to those escaping persecution. But all challenges of the past pale in comparison to those of the past several years that have attacked its very existence. The Trump administration led a multiyear campaign to dismantle asylum in the United States, from shutting off access altogether to raising the legal requirements to such an extent that only a small number of people could meet them. While the Biden administration has taken some actions and made some promises to restore protections, progress has been slow. The ratcheted-up standards have made the use of experts all but essential to gaining asylum for applicants.

The importance of experts cannot be overstated. The courts of appeals regularly cite expert testimony and reverse asylum denials where the adjudicator overlooked that testimony, which the courts have held must be considered when evaluating the need for protection. Indeed, as described in this handbook, Davies's testimony regarding persecution of gay men in Mexico led to the first published federal court precedent recognizing those claims. The landmark victory in that case paved the way for recognition of similar claims for LGBTQ+ people fleeing from countries all over the globe. The availability of expert testimony can quite literally have life or death consequences. Despite the central role country conditions experts play at this point in the broader asylum adjudication system, the need for experts far outstrips their availability.

The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, which I have called home since 2011, has been a pioneer in this area of the law. Our founding director, Karen Musalo, was one of the first attorneys to introduce, decades ago, expert testimony into asylum proceedings in immigration court. Among our programs, the Center provides technical assistance to legal representatives across the country, in over eight thousand cases in 2021 alone. We mentor attorneys, consult on winning legal theories, provide litigation resources, and connect advocates with experts.

In 2018 the Center launched the Asylum Expert Witness Database, the first of its kind. Over three hundred experts—including those specializing in country conditions and forensic medicine—have created profiles. Advocates have contacted experts through the database in more than 5,700 cases. In addition to facilitating such connections, the Center provides training for advocates and experts on substantive law and best practices in the field.

Bringing together asylum practitioners with experts, this handbook will make a meaningful contribution to this ongoing endeavor of expanding and professionalizing the use of expert testimony in asylum proceedings. The authors provide

FOREWORD xi both an interdisciplinary, scholarly grounding for this area and practical guidance for performing the work. Significantly, they offer insights into the challenges witnessing poses for experts on professional but also personal, emotional levels, which will normalize these conversations and help guide collective solutions for overcoming them.

The use of this handbook will go a long way toward ensuring our ultimate objective of securing safe haven for those in need. Hats off to Kimberly Gauderman and the other contributors for this accomplishment.

Blaine Bookey Legal Director, Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Practicing Asylum is a community project, one that has brought together practitioners of asylum, from immigration attorneys to legal scholars and academics, around the shared purpose of making effective expert testimony available to those seeking asylum. It began with a 2015 road trip to California with Liz Hutchison to meet with Blaine Bookey at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies to discuss ways to increase the number of country conditions expert witnesses. Already by that date, it was apparent that the need for experts far exceeded our number. We expanded our conversations in a national conference held at the University of New Mexico in 2017, bringing together attorneys and experts to share ideas on best practices for expert witnessing. Many of the contributors to this volume attended that conference. By then we also knew that the right to asylum, particularly for those fleeing gender-based violence in their home countries, was under attack. In the following years, the path to asylum became increasingly narrow and asylum seekers would face greater hurdles to substantiate their claims of persecution in their home countries. Increasing the number of experts to document and explain the dangers that asylum seekers fled remains critical to the fair adjudication of their cases. We still need, as Thomas M. Davies Jr. stated in our interview with him in 2015, “to harness the army”

Over the years, this project has indeed harnessed a community of many people and institutions, and it is my honor to acknowledge their support to this volume. First, I thank the volumes contributors: Maria Baldini-Potermin, J. Anna Cabot, Natalie Hansen, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison, and M. Gabriela Torres. Little did we know when we met for a writers’ workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the Womens International Studies Center (WISC) in early March 2020 that this event would be the last time that any of us would be in a group setting for the next two xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS years. Your ideas, creativity, and devotion of your time to this project in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedented attacks on asylum seekers and their advocates, and individual challenges uplifted my spirit, fortified my commitment to this project, and continue to inspire me. I also thank Blaine Bookey for contributing the foreword to this volume. In these times of unrelenting attacks on asylum seekers, your legal advocacy and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies support and resources for legal service providers and expert witnesses is vital to ensuring due process for those fleeing persecution in their home countries.

I am grateful to the institutions that supported my research and writing over the past years. The University of New Mexico History Department enthusiastically embraced my work as an expert witness and supported my research for this volume through the William Shoemaker Endowment in History Research Grant and the Snead-Wertheim Endowed Lectureship. Melissa Bokovoy and Judy Bieber, who chaired the department during this time, promoted my scholarship on immigration and asylum and facilitated my fellowship year and sabbatical leave. At the University of New Mexico, I also received generous support from the Latin American and Iberian Institute, including the Richard E. Greenleaf Conference Award, and from the Feminist Research Institute. Completion of this volume would not have been possible without funding from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Mellon Foundation’s Scholars & Society Fellowship, which gave me the rare gift of a year to research, write, and work with the contributors to this volume. I especially thank Desire Barron-Callaci, ACLS Program Officer for Public Engagement, and John Paul Christy, ACLS Senior Director of U.S. Programs, who worked with grantees and provided me with guidance and support during my fellowship year. Through this fellowship, I partnered with the Women's International Study Center in Santa Fe and its executive director, Jordan Young. Jordan administered grant funds and organized logistics, arranged lodging in WISC’s beautiful residences, and provided yummy food when all the contributors came together for our writers’ workshop. Jordan’s assistance, encouragement, and confidence in this project were key at critical junctures, and I am very grateful for my ongoing relationship with her and WISC.

I thank my colleagues who have supported this work and my life as an academic and expert witness. I have counted on Sam Truett, Jason Scott Smith, Durwood Ball, Les Field, and John Geissman for their good council, humor, and solidarity. Karen Powers, who introduced me to the National Archive of Ecuador many years ago, has continued to support me in my work and scholarship on asylum. Deborah Kang, with generosity and kindness, helped me refine my research on immigration history. Lynn Stephen inspires me as a model for her skill in combining rigorous scholarship with expert witnessing. Stefen Vogler’s insightful scholarship on LGBTQ+ asylum claims helped me refine my analyses of sexuality-based claims. I thank Marc Becker for sharing his expansive knowledge of modern Ecuador. I have learned a great deal about the asylum system from the legal service

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XV providers I have worked with over the years, and I thank them for entrusting me with their cases and for their guidance. I am especially thankful for the support I have received from attorneys Maria Baldini-Potermin, Blaine Bookey, Robert Etnyre, Natalie Hansen, Drew Heckman, Rebecca Kitson, and Hayden Rodarte. Tom Davies was extremely proud of his wife, Adele Davies, who nourished his spirit and joined him in his efforts to assist asylum seekers, and it is an honor to acknowledge her continuing work in support of immigrants and refugees in our community and her support for this project. The University of New Mexico has been my academic home for almost a quarter of a century, and I gratefully acknowledge the students I have been privileged to teach, my history and Latin Americanist colleagues, and the support I have received from staff, especially Yolanda Martinez, Barbara Wafer, and Dana Ellison. I also thank my colleagues in faculty governance and the staff who have supported us, especially Carol Stephens and Vivian Valencia, who are the keepers of our institutional memory. Shawn Austin, Chad Black, Sara Guengerich, and Margarita Ochoa, my former students and now professors, continue to inspire me to be a better historian. Laura Powell, ABD History, and Elisa Cibils, graduate of the MALAS/JD program, provided valuable assistance at different stages of this project.

I have been honored to work with the University of California Press editor, Kate Marshall, who consistently believed in the value of this volume and promoted its publication, including its release in the Luminos open access publishing program. I am also thankful for the guidance I received from Enrique Ochoa-Kaup and Chad Attenborough, who at different stages helped move this volume into production, and Sheila Berg, for skillfully copyediting the manuscript. I thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insights that helped us refine and polish our chapters.

Finally, this volume would not be possible without the support I have personally received from my friends and family. El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido is a rallying cry for social justice, but it also defines my life and my reliance on and commitment to my community. My daughter, Ariela, continues to bring me light, laughter, and great pride. Liz Hutchison is always on my side in times of uncertainty, darkness, and celebration. I am grateful for the love and support of Judy Bieber, my comadre. Marcelo Cruz brings me great joy and play-by-play reports on Latin American and European futbol matches. Gabriela Torres has been a constant friend since our time in Ecuador, and our expert witnessing was a nodal point for our work together in this volume. Ericka Verba brought music into my life and to our 2017 Practicing Asylum conference. James Wiltgen puts world politics into perspective and provides chocolates. Dan Harwig, Rosie Pegueros, Jacques Kapuscinski, Andrea Fox, Arcie Chapa, and Alicia Torres from FLACSO-Quito have continually supported me over the years. Joe, Scott, and Jenene have always championed their “big sis” I am fortunate to live on a block that has become my extended family. I am especially grateful to Tina Valentine and Andy Young, who xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS make sure that I am well, feed me, and light my pilot light; and to Elizabeth Weil, Frank Melcori, and Eve and Cary Morrow, for lifting my spirits when the world seems harsh. I also thank Jill and Tim, Nicole and Chris, Beth and Justin, Naomi and Sang, Dagmar, Maggie, Norma, and Laura for their many kindnesses and our famous block parties.

My path to expert witnessing and to this volume began with Tom Davies. Because of his tireless work on behalf of asylum seekers and his firm belief that each of us can contribute to social justice, we dedicate this book to his memory and devote a chapter to his life. We share his dedication to those who flee persecution and seek safe haven in the U.S., and his respect for their bravery in the face of danger in their home countries and in the U.S. asylum system.

Kimberly Gauderman Albuquerque, NM July 2022

AAA ACLS ACLU AEDPA AHA ATD BIA CAT CBP

CFI CICIG CRS DHS DOJ

DV ECLAC EOIR FGC GBV TIRAIRA

ABBREVIATIONS

American Anthropological Association

American Council of Learned Societies

American Civil Liberties Union

Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act

American Historical Association

alternative to detention

Board of Immigration Appeals

Convention Against Torture

Customs and Border Protection

credible fear interview

International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala Congressional Research Service

Department of Homeland Security

Department of Justice

domestic violence

Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean Executive Office for Immigration Review

female genital cutting

gender-based violence

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act

Xvii

XViii ABBREVIATIONS

IJ immigration judge

INA Immigration and Nationality Act

INS Immigration and Naturalization Service IRCA Immigration Reform and Control Act MCH master calendar hearing

MPP Migrant Protection Protocol

NTA Notice to Appear

ORR Office of Refugee Resettlement

PSG particular social group

RFI reasonable fear interview

SPC Service Processing Center

TPS Temporary Protected Status

TRAC Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Syracuse University)

UNFPA United Nations Fund for Population Activities (now United Nations Population Fund)

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees USCIS United States Citizenship and Immigration Services VAWA Violence Against Women Act

Introduction Expert Witnessing: A Call to Scholars

The scale and severity of violence in Latin America, and Central America in particular, has grown in the past decade, a trend exacerbated by social and legal norms that subordinate and disempower specific social groups, including women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons; by gangs that exercise territorial control and infiltrate security forces; and by weak governmental institutions and corrupt officials. This deepening violence and lack of state protection has forced new populations to flee their homes and seek safety at the U.S. border. The 2014 surge of mothers with children and unaccompanied minors, originating predominantly from the Northern Triangle of Central America, marked a demographic shift at the U.S.-Mexico border that has only continued to intensify. In 2014, family members and unaccompanied children accounted for 29 percent of apprehensions; in 2018, they accounted for almost 50 percent of apprehensions.* In November 2019, more immigrants from Guatemala and Honduras were apprehended than Mexicans, the first time any other country had exceeded the number of Mexican nationals apprehended at the border.?

Unlike the majority of immigrants who enter the U.S. from Mexico—many of them single adults seeking economic opportunity —most women, children, and members of other persecuted groups who cross our border do not avoid apprehension but rather seek out and present themselves to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers. They are asylum seekers, fleeing physical and sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, and death threats often perpetrated by family members, gangs, and/or security officials. According to both international and U.S. law, migrants on U.S. territory who claim persecution in their home country on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group (PSG), or political opinion (collectively known as “protected grounds”) must be given a “credible fear interview” (CFI) or a “reasonable fear interview” (REI) by an asylum officer, to determine whether the individual will be allowed to apply for asylum.’ If an asylum officer determines in this interview that the person seeking asylum would face credible or reasonable fear of persecution upon return to their country of origin, they may be detained or released with a bond to a sponsor, usually a family member, while they initiate an asylum claim.

On March 20, 2020, the Trump administration suspended the right of noncitizens to ask for protection at our southern border, using Title 42, a health provision in U.S. law. Under Title 42, individuals have been expelled with no opportunity to seek asylum.* Despite this decline in the proportion of those allowed to apply for asylum, the number of asylum seekers has continued to grow, resulting in a backlog of over 1.6 million cases pending before immigration judges in early 2022; asylum applicants now wait an average of five years for an immigration hearing.? Despite this sizable backlog, the government has repeatedly starved the immigration court system of resources, choosing instead to increase funding to agencies involved in immigration enforcement.*

Barriers for asylum seekers to access the immigration system and qualify for asylum dramatically increased during the Trump administration, from 2016 to 2020. Following through on a key campaign promise, he sought to reduce if not end immigration at the southern border, including and sometimes explicitly targeting asylum seekers. In all, Trump issued 1,064 restrictive immigration polices between January 2017 and January 2021, or over 5 per week during his term in office.” Many of these policies focused directly on stopping immigrants and asylum seekers at the Mexican border, migrants whom Trump declared “aren't people. These are animals.” Departing from other administrations, Trump’s goal was not only to restrict asylum, but to end it altogether. In a 2019 speech, he told Congress to “get rid of the whole asylum system.” According to Eleanor Acer, senior director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, Trump championed once-extremist views that characterized refugees and asylum seekers as privileged cheaters who jumped the line in front of other immigrants and as criminals.' This discursive shift not only portrayed asylum seekers and refugees as unworthy of protection but also attacked a core vision, one that predates the U.S. Constitution, of the U.S. as a shelter for those fleeing persecution.

Two particular Trump administration policies—the infamous family separation policy and the equally draconian Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)—dramatically reduced asylum seekers' access to due process in U.S. immigration courts. First, in summer 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) enacted a “zero-tolerance” policy that criminalized migrant parents and led to the long-term separation of over five thousand children from their parents.'* According to Trump officials, the goal of this policy was specifically to deter mothers from seeking asylum at the Mexican border.” As of February 2021, over one thousand children remained

INTRODUCTION 3 separated from their parents and the parents of another five hundred children remained missing because the government did not keep adequate records of family relationships and some parents were deported without their children." Then, in 2019, the Trump administration enacted the MPP, a program that removed over seventy thousand asylum seekers in the U.S. to Mexico, where they awaited a hearing with a U.S. immigration judge (IJ).'* MPP was designed exclusively for individuals from Latin America, and before the program' end in 2020, less than 1 percent of asylum seekers were successful in their cases. The Biden administration initially stopped this program but, due to legal challenges by several border states, restarted MPP in December 2021, and it became known as MPP 2. In its first six months, only 5 percent of those assigned to this program found legal representation and only 2.4 percent were granted asylum or some other form of protection."

After 2016, migrants who made it across the border faced increasingly higher barriers within the asylum system itself Under the Trump administration, the path to asylum and other forms of relief was substantially narrowed, and the requirements to substantiate a case were increased. Executive orders, decisions by attorneys general, and new rules in the past four years have denied asylum applicants due process and narrowed the grounds of protection. Building on Obamaera responses to increased immigration at the southern border,'* Trump issued the Border Immigration Enforcement Executive Order on January 25, 2017. This executive order further expanded immigration detention and the use of expedited removal for asylum seekers, effectively foreclosing an individual's ability to meaningfully prepare for a hearing in front of an immigration judge.” In 2018 and 2019, Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr issued decisions that defined gender-based and gang violence as private criminality ineligible for asylum protection, limited protection to family members fleeing violence, and increased the burden on applicants to demonstrate their government' failure to protect them from violence.'* These decisions had a particularly negative impact on women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons fleeing domestic and gang violence in the Northern Triangle; in fact, some have argued, the changes were designed to target, return, and discourage precisely these populations.” In the final month of the Trump administration, December 2020, the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) jointly issued a rule that, among other damaging provisions, allowed immigration judges for the first time to deny asylum claims without holding hearings. Scheduled for implementation on January 11, 2021, this rule was legally challenged by immigration advocacy organizations, and they were granted a preliminary injunction that has, at least temporarily, prevented it from taking effect.%

As this volume goes to press, the Biden administration has only just begun to dismantle some of Trump' immigration policies, a process that could take many years to complete. In the meantime, asylum applicants will continue to navigate a system that requires them to articulate and substantiate multiple narrow and interconnected legal arguments, and to do so without access to legal or social services necessary to sustain an asylum process that can take years to resolve.? As discussed below and further in this volume, changes to many of the criteria that establish asylum eligibility can be executed through administrative fiat by the attorney general rather than through Congress or the courts. Asylum seekers, along with immigration rights activists and legal service providers, have had no choice other than to adapt to these politically motivated efforts to dismantle the asylum system, a process that Trump regularly referred to as a “scam”? This handbook provides the tools and resources essential for both the existing asylum process and the changes that will inevitably follow in this contentious and highly vulnerable area of U.S. asylum law.

WHY WE NEED A HANDBOOK FOR PRACTICING ASYLUM

Although this handbook was created in the context of the Trump administration’s wholesale assault on asylum, it goes beyond these changes to address the long-standing and continuing need for readily available and effective expert witness testimony in the asylum system. Even as many researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and intervened as experts in public debates on immigration reform, the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that can contribute productively to the fair adjudication of asylum claims in the United States. Country conditions expert witnesses are positioned to provide critical support, through written affidavits and live hearing testimony, that may confirm on what grounds the applicant may seek protection, based on evidence of the types of violence that exist in the country of origin. In particular, over the past ten to fifteen years, scholars and legal professionals have increasingly collaborated to defend the rights of women, children, LGBTQ+ persons, and others who have experienced gender-based, sexuality-based, and gang violence in their home countries. Observing almost daily the lack of trained expert witnesses for this important work, the collaborators in this volume set out to compile a record of best practices for engaging, training, employing, and increasing the efficacy of the work of academics as expert witnesses in order to respond effectively to the ever-increasing number of asylum cases and to the heightened burden for applicants to document their status and vulnerability to persecution in their home countries. What followed were a series of conversations, held in multiple academic and legal professional venues, and a lengthy workshop and editing project led by Kimberly Gauderman.”

Our objective in this volume is to build on the ongoing cooperation between legal service providers and scholars engaged in asylum work and to offer an interdisciplinary, scholarly, and practical guide to current and future practitioners in this growing field. We center the practice of expert witness testimony within the

INTRODUCTION 5 exigencies of the academy, which requires scholars to exercise disciplinary rigor in their fields of expertise and to navigate institutional standards that recognize scholarly achievement and determine criteria for promotion. Acknowledging these tensions inherent in community-engaged scholarship, the book’s chapters address how to establish expertise as a country conditions witness through teaching and research; how disciplinary expertise intersects with legal argumentation; and how our labor as expert witnesses balances with and fulfills institutional requirements for teaching, research, and service.

This volume also offers practical instruction for drafting affidavits, communicating with legal professionals, preparing for oral testimony in hearings, and handling the specific challenges of working with applicants in detention centers. The appendixes offer guidance for affidavits and agreements between expert witnesses and legal service providers. Finally, the volume offers an analysis of gender-based, sexuality-based, and gang violence in Latin America; a discussion of persecution on account of gender identity and/or sexual orientation; a history of U.S. immigration and asylum laws; and discussion of the emotional challenges and secondary trauma that may have an impact on expert witnesses and legal professionals working with individuals who have experienced high levels of violence in their home countries. These topics provide a context for expert witness testimony that will allow practitioners to adapt to shifting criteria for refugee status and present a multidisciplinary perspective on how the normalization and dismissal of gender-based and sexuality-based violence not only forces people to flee their homes, but continues to endanger them within the asylum system itself.

The Practicing Asylum handbook is divided into three sections. In Part 1, “The Professional Is Political: Life Stories in Asylum Work,” three scholars who have served as country conditions expert witnesses for decades discuss their motivations for engaging in expert witnessing, the disciplinary expertise they bring to asylum work, and how they have balanced expert witnessing with the rigors and requirements of academic life. The first chapter provides an oral history with Thomas M. Davies Jr., a don of expert witness testimony who worked on hundreds of Latin American LGBTQ+, gang violence, and domestic violence cases from Latin America, inspiring other scholars—including several contributors to this volume—to work as expert witnesses. Davies, whose energies focused on asylum throughout his retirement up to his death in 2019, was renowned for his 2000 testimony in Hernandez-Montiel v. INS, a groundbreaking case before the Ninth Circuit that for the first time affirmed transgender women’s right to asylum. In the next two chapters, M. Gabriela Torres and Kimberly Gauderman offer very different perspectives on the disciplinary and professional challenges they have faced in their work as country conditions experts. In her chapter, Torres analyzes how an anthropologist as expert can assess the failures of Guatemala’s current legal and social protections for women in marital arrangements (including common law unions), which drive many women to seek refuge in the United States to escape forced, violent marriages. In her chapter, the historian and handbook editor Kimberly Gauderman argues that expert witness testimony is not only crucial to the success of asylum claimants but also builds on and strengthens the profile of academics in their institutions and professional disciplines. Taken together, the three chapters in part 1 provide different models for how scholars engaged in expert witnessing can integrate expert witnessing into their academic work, advancing both research and legal strategies for asylum defense and strengthening their professional trajectories.