A Manatt team led by litigation associate Andrea Bird was honored with a 2016 CLAY Award by the Daily Journal for advancing the issue of transgender rights in the immigration law context by persuading a Ninth Circuit panel to grant relief to a transgender Mexican woman in the U.S. Recipients of this year's CLAY Awards were featured in a special supplement published on March 16, 2016.
With support from the Public Law Center, Bird and her team secured a groundbreaking victory in September 2015 for transgender immigrants seeking relief from torture when the Ninth Circuit suspended the deportation of a transgender Mexican woman. The opinion in Avendano-Hernandez v. Lynch is far-reaching and precedent-setting, as it distinguishes gender identity from sexual orientation, identifies the unique vulnerabilities faced by transgender individuals, and recognizes that the Convention Against Torture does not require acquiescence of a higher level of government when low-level public officials commit torture.
In its profile of the honorees, the Daily Journal reports that the opinion will be especially useful to the Southern California removal defense bar because of a pending government plan to house as many as 60 transgender women facing deportation at its Adelanto Detention Facility southeast of Los Angeles, concentrating such cases there.
"No other decision so clearly recognizes that gender identity is not the same as sexual orientation. In so doing, the court moves the jurisprudence forward in a way that extends dignity as well as the promise of protection to transgender individuals," said Karen Musalo of UC Hastings College of the Law's Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, who was not involved in the case.
Bird led the appellate team that included Manatt partner Matthew Williamson and former associate Janine Weiss, as well as Public Law Center's Munmeeth Soni. Support was also provided by Manatt partners Benjamin Shatz and Marilyn Martin-Culver.
The decision received widespread media attention and was covered by Reuters, BBC News, The Atlantic, Law360 and many others.