Cleary Peruvian Pro Bono Clients Secure Asylum in U.S.

Cleary Gottlieb successfully represented Ms. H and her daughter, natives of Peru, in their defensive applications for asylum in the United States.

Ms. H and her daughter’s battle for asylum began back in 2016. A Quechua woman born in the countryside of Peru, Ms. H was subject to gender-based persecution from an early age—raised by a father who frequently used corporal punishment for the slightest offense and who regularly declared his daughters as worthless compared to their brothers. At 14, Ms. H fled the countryside for Lima in search of the educational and job opportunities from which her father had barred her. There, from ages 14 to 36, Ms. H successively fell victim to three separate male abusers, each of whom subjected her to brutal and frequent sexual, physical, and verbal harm.

Ms. H escaped the violence of the first two abusers due to their death and imprisonment, respectively. Her last abuser, however, beat Ms. H before, during, and after her pregnancy with their daughter; did so in front of her other children; and due to racist, anti-indigenous ideologies, frequently asserted that Ms. H deserved such vicious treatment. Despite numerous attempts to seek help from law enforcement and women’s centers, Ms. H did not receive aid from her plight.

When Ms. H finally found the means to escape this abuser’s home, he followed Ms. H for five years despite her many attempts to avoid him via relocation to several different areas of Peru. When Ms. H looked out her window one day to see her abuser standing outside of her and her daughter’s apartment with a deadly weapon in hand, she knew that to remain in Peru was to risk their lives.

Ms. H and her daughter fled to the United States in late 2016. Due to structural changes within Virginia’s immigration courts, their removal proceedings were delayed until this year. Cleary argued that Ms. H’s harrowing experiences in Peru granted her a reasonable and well-founded fear of persecution, should she be forced to return, on account of her political opinion and her membership in three particular social groups: Peruvian women, Peruvian woman treated as property, and Peruvian women unable to leave their relationships. The firm retained medical and country conditions expert witnesses, who confirmed Ms. H’s physical and psychological trauma from her experiences in Peru, where domestic violence and femicide is rampant and legal regress is not granted to most due to systemic weaknesses in enforcement, cultural machismo, and victims’ fear of retaliation from their abusers.

The Cleary team worked with Ms. H and her daughter to prepare and file their prehearing asylum submission before the Annandale Immigration Court. On July 24, 2024, after a hearing during which Ms. H gave lengthy direct testimony, the Department of Homeland Security deferred to Immigration Judge (IJ) Lolita M. Lukose, who granted Ms. H and her daughter asylum pending an update of her daughter’s biometrics. At the conclusion of hearing, the judge took the time to note that it was specifically Ms. H’s moving testimony that day that convinced her to rule in Ms. H’s favor. On December 16, 2024, once Ms. H’s daughter’s biometrics were updated, IJ Lukose officially granted asylum to Ms. H and her daughter. Thus concluded an exactly eight-year’s long battle for asylum and a decades’ long fight for safety. Ms. H thanked the Cleary team for “fighting by her side,” and divulged that she feels “reborn” now that she and her daughter are safe here in the United States.

Cleary received mentorship from Human Rights First on this case.