Asylum seekers face restrictive process
For victims of violence, denial looms larger
WASHINGTON — Xiomara started dating him when she was 17. He was different then, not yet the man who pushed drugs and ran with a gang. Not the man who she says berated and raped her, who roused her out of bed some mornings only to beat her.
Not the man who choked her with an electrical cord, or put a gun to her head while she screamed, then begged, “‘Please, please don’t kill me — I love you.’ ”
Fleeing El Salvador with their daughter, then 4, the 23-year-old mother pleaded for help at a port of entry in El Paso, Texas, on a chilly day in December 2016.
After nearly two years, her petition for asylum remains caught in a backlog of more than 310,000 other claims. And while she has waited for a ruling, her chance of success has plunged.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions in June issued a decision meant to block most victims of domestic abuse and gang violence from winning asylum, saying that “private criminal acts” generally are not grounds to seek refuge in the U.S. Already, that ruling has narrowed the path for legal refuge for tens of thousands of people attempting to flee strife and poverty in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
“You can tell there is something happening,” said longtime immigration attorney Carlos Garcia, who in mid-July spoke to more than 70 women in one cellblock at a family detention center in Texas. Most had received denials of their claims that they have what the law deems a “credible fear of persecution.”
“More than I’ve ever seen before,” he said.
In North Carolina, where federal immigration agents sparked criticism last month when they arrested Sessions two domestic-violence survivors at a courthouse, some immigration judges are refusing to hear any asylum claims based on allegations of domestic abuse.
Under the Refugee Act of 1980, judges can only grant asylum, which allows a person to stay in the U.S. legally, to people escaping persecution based on religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in “a particular social group.”
As drug-war violence escalated over the last two decades in Mexico and Central America, fueled by a U.S demand for drugs and waged by gangs partly grown on American streets, human rights lawyers pushed to have victims of domestic violence or gang crime considered part of such a social group when their governments won’t protect them. After years of argument, they won a major victory in 2014 when the country’s highest immigration court, the Board of Immigration Appeals, ruled in favor of a woman from Guatemala who fled a husband who had beaten and raped her with impunity.
Sessions, in June, used his legal authority over the Sisters from Guatemala seeking asylum cross a bridge from Matamoros, Mexico, to a U.S. port of entry in Brownsville, Texas. Asylum seekers now face a more restricted process. immigration system to reverse that decision, deciding a case brought by a woman identified in court as A.B.
“Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems — even all serious problems — that people face every day all over the world,” he said.
Immigration advocates reacted with outrage.
Karen Musalo, a cocounsel for A.B. and a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, called the decision “a return to the dark ages of refugee law,” a move inconsistent with a steady evolving principle “that women’s rights are human rights.”
Neither the government, nor the police, could help Xiomera in her rural town, where gangs were deeply embedded. “Are you kidding?” she said, asking to be identified by only her first name out of concern about possible retaliation. “I would go to the police department and wouldn’t come back alive — if I came back at all.”
For more than two decades, U.N. officials and human rights lawyers have argued that women victimized by domestic violence in societies where police refuse to help are being persecuted because of their gender and should be treated as refugees entitled to asylum.
But Sessions and other administration officials have a very different view, and they have made a broad effort to curb the path to asylum. The number of people entering the U.S. by claiming asylum has risen sharply in recent years, and administration officials have portrayed the process as a “loophole” in the nation’s immigration laws.
Xiomera, now 25, won’t have her asylum hearing for another year. For months, she scraped by on meager wages, babysitting and waiting on tables. She was relieved to find a job at a factory that pays $10 an hour. The American dream is “one big lie,” she now says.
But at least here, she said, she and her daughter are alive.