What happens when women flee violence in Central America but are turned away from our border despite having credible claims of danger in their home countries? Buzzfeed’s John Stanton profiles a 22-year-old woman (not named to ensure her safety) who fled her native El Salvador after receiving threats from gang members from Mara 18. She arrived safely into the hands of U.S. immigration officials, but “because detainees don’t have a right to representation, there was no lawyer to piece together evidence, meaning officials had only her story to go by. With nothing to back up her claim, she was denied asylum and deported.” Just months after arriving back home, the young woman was “brutally beaten and raped by the gang leader, who declared her his property”:
Nancy Oretskin, the Salvadoran woman’s attorney and the director of the Southwest Asylum & Migration Institute, says changes to asylum law are needed to eliminate a perverse incentive for persecuted people to wait until they are tortured or raped before coming to the United States. “We can’t give them legal protection until they’re raped,” Oretskin said. “And even then, we deport many of them after they’ve been raped, and they’re killed. How does that happen in a civilized society?”
Change is unlikely under the current administration. A few months after President Trump was sworn in, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued new guidance to Department of Justice attorneys that emphasized the need to use prosecutions to “further reduce illegality” and that instructed them to pursue more criminal charges against undocumented immigrants.
In fact, if the Trump administration has its way, it could become ever harder for asylum-seekers. On Sunday the White House proposed a set of changes to immigration law, including new limits on who can qualify for an asylum hearing and new rules to curb the ability of immigration judges to block deportations of asylum-seekers.
And federal law remains “heavily weighted to asylum claims based on state-sponsored persecution,” not gangs plaguing Central American nations. Additionally, unshackled immigration agents have already been championing Trump’s nativist agenda and the administration, under former Homeland Security Secretary and current White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, faces a lawsuit after agents allegedly and illegally turned away asylum seekers fleeing violence. Border agents have falsely told asylum seekers that “Donald Trump just signed new laws saying there is no asylum for anyone.” The lawsuit also alleged that two asylum seekers turned away included a Honduran mother and daughter who had been “repeatedly raped by MS-13 gang members.” Once at the border, agents denied them a chance to apply for asylum.
As for the young woman from El Salvador, it took three tries for immigration officials to be convinced of the mortal danger she faced in her home country, a nation with one of the highest murder rates in the world. She again fled after she was raped, but during her second time at the border, she wasn’t given a credible fear interview. She was instead lied to. “I thought I was signing papers to see a judge,” she said, “but it turned out I was signing my deportation papers.” She was deported again. She tried a third time, and under Oretskin’s watch, began the long road to finally winning asylum, with the attorney at one point flying in a former El Salvadoran Supreme Court justice to testify on her behalf regarding the dire conditions in the nation:
“The law is set up to get people to fail … most people can’t show a note from their torturer,” said David Leopold, an immigration attorney and former president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
That’s especially true for people who hastily flee threats of violence with virtually nothing.
“That’s why it’s important for people to be well represented when they make an asylum claim,” Leopold said. “Because this is really your only shot.”
Even with a lawyer, the immigration system is nearly impossible to navigate. Over the next six months, Oretskin said one hearing was canceled without notice, another ended prematurely, and the case was reassigned to three different judges.
“Every time you go in, it’s like a new day, because it’s a new judge and new [DHS] attorney,” Oretskin said with exasperation.
“It took just a few hours for the judge to rule that the young woman qualified for protection under the Convention Against Torture,” Stanton writes. She is now living with aunts in the U.S. “This country of immigrants, this country that’s so welcoming on paper, in many ways treats asylum-seekers like criminals,” said Leopold. “We treat it like it’s an enforcement issue and not a humanitarian one.”