Gaining asylum in U.S. a tough task
Restrictions make ‘credible fear’ elusive
LOS FRESNOS, Texas — Patricia Aragon told the U.S. asylum officer at her recent assessment that she was fleeing her native Honduras because she had been robbed and raped by a gang member who threatened to kill her and her 9-year-old daughter if she went to the police.
Until recently, the 41-year-old seamstress would have had a good chance of clearing that first hurdle in the asylum process due to a “credible fear” for her safety, but she didn’t. The officer said the Honduran government wasn’t to blame for what happened to Aragon and she’ll likely be sent home.
“The U.S. has always been characterized as a humanitarian country,” Aragon said through tears at Port Isabel, a remote immigration detention center near Los Fresnos, about 15 miles from the Mexico border. “My experience has been very difficult.”
As part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently tightened restrictions on the types of cases that can qualify someone for asylum, making it harder for Central Americans who say they’re fleeing gangs, drug smugglers or domestic violence to pass even the first hurdle.
Immigration lawyers say that’s meant more asylum seekers failing interviews with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to establish credible fear of harm in their home countries. They also say that immigration judges, who work for the Justice Department, are overwhelmingly signing off on those recommendations, ending what could have been a yearslong asylum process.
“This is a direct, manipulated attack on the asylum process,” said Sofia Casini of the Austin nonprofit Grassroots Leadership, which has been working with immigrant women at the nearby T. Don Hutto detention center who were separated from their kids under a widely condemned policy that President Donald Trump ended on June 20.
Casini said that of the roughly 35 separated mothers her group worked with, more than a third failed their credible fear interviews, which is about twice the failure rate of before the new restrictions took effect. Nationally, more than 2,000 immigrant children and parents have yet to be reunited, including Aragon and her daughter, who is at a New York children’s shelter and whose future is as unclear as her mother’s.
In order to qualify for asylum, seekers must demonstrate that they have a well-founded fear they’ll be persecuted back home based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinions. Interviews with USCIS asylum officers, which typically last 30-60 minutes, are sometimes done by phone. Any evidence asylum seekers present to support their claims must be translated into English and they often don’t have lawyers present.
The agency has funding for 687 asylum officers this fiscal year, but only about 510 are actually working at field offices nationwide. About 75 percent of USCIS’ total asylum staff members were at detention facilities in border states at the end of June.
In 2010, the Obama administration began allowing many immigrants passing credible fear interviews to remain free while their asylum cases progressed. The number of asylum seekers spiked, with federal authorities referring nearly 92,000 people for credible fear interviews during the 2016 fiscal year, compared to about 5,000 nine years earlier.
After complaining that the asylum system had become “overloaded with fake claims,” Sessions last month reversed the granting of asylum to a Salvadoran woman who fled more than a decade of domestic abuse. “Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” the attorney general wrote.