The Legal Aid Society filed two amicus briefs in the matter of Scarlett v. Barr in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, on behalf of over one hundred immigration and refugee law scholars and clinical professors. Our briefs, one issued before the Court’s decision and another in support of a petition to rehear the case, opposed the adoption of the “condoned-or-complete helplessness” state action standard in asylum cases.

Through Scarlett v. Barr, the Second Circuit has unjustly adopted the heightened standard that an asylum applicant show that their former government would “condone” their persecution or be “completely helpless” to protect the applicant. In our briefs, we urged the Circuit to maintain the the “unwilling -or-unable” standard in analyzing an asylum applicant’s claims that their home government cannot protect them from harm by private actors. The petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc was denied in July, 2020.