Thanks to the dedication of Jenner & Block Partners Wade Thomson, Megan Poetzel, and Hope Tone-O’Keefe, Associate Michael Pearson, and former associates Meg Hlousek and Nathaniel Schetter, alongside their partnership with the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), Jaime Jose Hernandez Froilan, his wife Genesis, and their daughter Leia were granted asylum in the United States in 2025.
Jaime had served in Venezuela's Presidential Honor Guard for over a decade. He was not a dissident. He did not organize against the government. He was, by every measure, a loyal public servant until the regime decided to turn its back on due process and respect for human rights.
In 2016, after returning from a delayed honeymoon in Curaçao with Genesis, his wife, Jaime was summoned by Venezuela's military counterintelligence agency, the Dirección General de Contrainteligencia Militar (DGCIM). The agency had determined, without evidence, that his travel meant he had met with political opponents. During the interrogation that followed, officers beat him and attempted to suffocate him. Afterwards, the punishment continued in a different form: for the next eleven weeks, Jaime was ordered to report to agency headquarters every morning and sit there until nightfall, sleeping in his car or in motels, hours from home. He was released only after signing documents promising silence about the government for ten years.
Three years later, in April 2019, the agency came for him again. Officers arrived at his home before dawn, masked and armed. Jaime was taken to a safe house, beaten, and told he would be killed. Jaime came home to his family from the rural roadside where the DGCIM had abandoned him and made a choice no family should ever have to make: they needed to flee from the only country they had ever known to keep their family safe. On July 20, 2019, Jaime, Genesis, and their two-year-old daughter Leia fled through Colombia and Mexico and presented themselves at the United States border to request asylum.
NIJC referred the family to Jenner & Block in 2020, and the firm took on the case pro bono. The team documented the Venezuelan government's systematic persecution of military members suspected of opposing the Maduro regime, established Jaime's credibility as a witness, and built a merits brief arguing that the torture he endured and the threats made against his family constituted past persecution under United States asylum law. It was patient, precise, years-long work on behalf of a family that had already waited long enough.
On July 11, 2025, after years of living in fear, Jenner & Block secured asylum for Jaime and his family. Now settled in Mishawaka, Indiana, the rhythms of daily life have replaced the fear that once defined every decision Jaime and Genesis made. Jaime is in his final year of a millwright apprenticeship and enjoys playing soccer and softball on weekends. Leia is growing up in Indiana; with the stability her parents crossed three countries to give her. The Venezuelan government took years from this family. Jenner & Block and NIJC helped them reclaim what came next.
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