The US authority is reviewing the asylum case of Rashed Chowdhury, one of death sentence awarded killers of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation.
US Attorney General William Barr quietly reopened the case last month, according to a reports published in the US journal Politico.
On June 17, Barr directed the Board of Immigration Appeals to send Rashed Chowdhury’s case to him for review—making clear he would reopen the matter. The document in which the attorney general made this move doesn’t include Rashed Chowdhury’s name. But it refers to “the matter of A-M-R-C,” using his full initials. And the details of the case described in Barr’s announcement match Chowdhury’s.
Barr’s move is the first step in a process that could result in Rashed Chowdhury losing asylum after more than a decade and potentially facing deportation.
Rashed Chowdhury’s legal team calls the move deeply concerning. Marc Van Der Hout, who represents Rashed along with counsel from Morrison & Foerster’s San Francisco office, said they believe Barr has likely already decided to overturn the immigration court’s decision to grant him asylum. If Barr didn’t disagree with the judges’ findings in Chowdhury’s favor, Van Der Hout said, he would have no reason to reopen the case.
“There is no doubt in my mind that this is a foregone conclusion,” Van Der Hout said. “He’s doing the recertification and asking for briefs on this for appearance only. There’s no reason that he would have reopened this case if not to overturn the BIA decision.”
Others also say the move sends a chilling signal to immigrants living in the US said Jeremy McKinney, the first vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association,
“Taking anyone’s immigration case more than a decade after the issue has been resolved and deciding to reopen it is disturbing to our association,” he said, “and we think it should be disturbing to all stakeholders before the immigration court, not simply the foreign nationals that appear before immigration judges, but even the DHS, to think that nothing can truly be final.”
And he said the abrupt reopening doesn’t make sense.
“I’ve been practicing immigration law for more than two decades, and I had never seen someone’s case pulled out of the storage and dusted off for readjudication over a decade later,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Bangabandhu’s killer Rashed Chowdhury has been living in the US since 1996 after Sheikh Hasina led Awami League assumed in the power.
Rashed Chowdhury was the top diplomat at Bangladesh’s embassy in Brazil then and was soon summoned home. But he fled to the United States with his wife and son. Rashed and his family went to the US in 1996 on visitor visas and applied for asylum.
Nearly 10 years after he fled to the US, an US immigration judge granted him asylum. But Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which handles US government arguments against immigrants’ efforts to stay in the US, appealed the judge’s ruling. DHS lawyers argued his participation in the 1975’s coup in Bangladesh should disqualify him from receiving asylum.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s government has for years been open about its efforts to persuade the US to extradite Rashed Chowdhury. Finally, the latest move taken by the US Attorney General rose a hope of extradition of the Bangabandhu’s killer.
BDST: 1200 HRS, JUL 25, 2020
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