You're listening to serious inquiries only. Oh, Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only this is 154. I'm your host Thomas Smith and who what a newsweek, huh?

Wow. Well, I'm not going to talk about that, but there's a lot of opening arguments content about the the Trump news

Michael Cohen news the Manafort news it's big so definitely check that out if that's

what you're interested in.

But I have something that's a great interview and related to the Trump administration,

which is Zarin from about a month back or so, set me up with an immigration attorney that she had spoken to,

and I interviewed, he was kind enough to come on and I asked him a bunch of questions about immigration law policy, his work, and it's really interesting stuff.

It was a great chance to work with someone who has dealt with these laws and these policies on the ground level there and knows more about it than I'm guessing you or I so here's my interview with Ryan Whitmer about immigration and asylum and Trump's policy versus Obama's policy a lot of stuff so here we go

I'm joined by Ryan Whitmer. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. How's it going Ryan? Oh, it's going well, Thomas. I am so excited to speak to you it's you know I'm sure it's a it's a

busy time for you and anyone in your field. But first and foremost you want to

kind of introduce yourself to the listeners tell us a little bit about you and the work you do.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. I am an immigration attorney. I work at a small law firm in Buffalo, New York. I've been doing this for about five years now and we practice pretty much all areas of immigration law.

We handle a lot of asylum cases and other kinds of deportation defense,

as well as a family and business immigration.

Must be an interesting time to be doing your work I imagine.

It is the you know changes in the new administration are keeping us busy updating everything that we're doing on a monthly basis, it seems.

Yeah, definitely. Well, so much I want to talk to you about, I suppose maybe I'll start, you know, because I spoke with Zaren on the show, she talked to us a bit about her situation.

And, you know, I'm wondering maybe how typical her experience is if you could speak generally about maybe asylum and, you know, U.S. policy and the kind of cases you see in general.

Okay. Yeah, well, I mean, there are so many different cases out there.

You know, it really is unique for every person.

You know, when we're talking about asylum cases, we're talking about asylum cases we're talking about people who are seeking the

ability to live in the United States because they have a fear of returning to their country

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