A year ago “Ella,” a 23-year-old gay woman, was caught in a hotel room in her native Uganda having sex with a female partner. Police intervened when villagers accosted the women, burned them with hot oil, and forced them to march naked—but it wasn’t to help them. “Ella” said the officers beat her after charging them both with immorality. But her ordeal wasn’t over yet. When “Ella” fled to Uganda’s capital, she was stalked by a man her family hired to “cure” her of her homosexuality by raping her. When the terrified woman was able to obtain a student visa, she fled to the U.S. with plans to stay with her cousin in Seattle before starting school in Virginia. “Ella” should have had the opportunity to apply for asylum, but she was instead deported back to face even more danger and possible death:
“When I got to Washington I was interviewed by the officers, they saw that I had some tickets to go stay at my cousin’s place, and she said you’re not going to school,” Ella recounted in a conversation with The Intercept. “They took away my phone, and I couldn’t call anyone who could explain. I tried to tell them what was happening with me, but they didn’t understand.”
As a person fleeing violent oppression, Ella could have asked for asylum. If Customs and Border Protection determined that she had a “credible fear” of returning home, she could stay in the United States while her asylum claim was adjudicated.
But as the report details, “’Ella’ wasn’t able to articulate what had happened to her.” Not only was she already deeply traumatized from the physical beatings and subsequent rape coordinated by her own family, but conditioned to hide herself due to anti-LGBTQ bigotry in Uganda, she was terrified to tell agents she was gay. So, when CBP officers snatched her phone away, refused to let her call her cousin, and leveled accusations at her—that her cousin was her boyfriend, that she never intended to go to school, that she really didn’t have any fear about returning to Uganda—she gave in under their relentless pressure:
“You cannot imagine what it is like to sit before an officer who has your whole life in her hands,” Ella wrote in a statement she provided to The Intercept. She “thought the new president does not like gay people, and if I told the officer I was gay, she would deport me on the spot.” She said that the officer “forced me to say that my cousin was my boyfriend, because that is what she wanted to hear.”
In our telephone interview, Ella choked up. “For my whole life, I had to hide my sexuality and the whole time I was there being questioned, I didn’t know what to say. All I was thinking was I was afraid to tell them and afraid to be raped again.”
“Her case shows the need for access to counsel,” her attorney Hassan Ahmad, who was contacted by “Ella’s” cousin when he couldn’t reach her in detention, said in a blog post about the case. “I needed only 5 seconds to advise her. It shows the ease with which an officer can deny this so-called ‘easy ticket’ to the most vulnerable. It shows what gay people have to endure around the world. It shows how wrong Sessions & Co. is.” As Murtaza Hussain reports, “the Trump administration has sought to delegitimize the asylum process as a whole, with Jeff Sessions saying recently that the ‘system is subject to rampant abuse and fraud’ and ‘overloaded with fake claims.’” But if Sessions is looking for “rampant abuse and fraud,” he should go look in the mirror:
Last May, a blockbuster report from Human Rights First revealed that agents from Customs and Border Protection have been illegally “turning away foreign nationals who arrive at the Mexican border seeking asylum from persecution in their homelands,” telling some that “Trump says we don’t have to let you in.” This week, legal groups and advocates took action, filing a class action lawsuit against DHS Sec. John Kelly and other federal officials.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California alleges that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have used a range of tactics to deny people their right to state their fears of persecution and apply for asylum, including “misrepresentations, threats and intimidation, verbal abuse and physical force.”
In some cases, the complaint alleges, CBP officials have told people that “Donald Trump just signed new laws saying there is no asylum for anyone.” In other instances, border guards have allegedly threatened to take away the foreigners’ children unless they signed forms forgoing their asylum claims or said on camera that they had no fear of returning home.
In “Ella’s” case, she “was granted temporary accommodation by officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees” when her return flight to Uganda had a layover in Dubai. Since then, she’s been in Kenya as her “lawyers have asked for her to be paroled back to the United States to make an asylum claim, but so far CBP has refused this request.” “Homosexuality activity” is also illegal in Kenya, though enforcement of their anti-gay law “has been more sporadic than in Uganda.” According to human rights advocates, hundreds of Ugandans have applied for asylum in Kenya, and despite Uganda’s courts invalidating harsh anti-gay legislation, advocates report 48 cases of anti-LGBT persecution that include “torture by the state”:
“This is part of a larger picture of how asylum-seekers are being treated at the border,” says Azadeh N. Shahshahani, a human rights attorney with the advocacy group Project South. “Treatment of asylum-seekers by CBP was already a problem during Obama administration, but with the changes that have occurred since Trump came to office – particularly the executive orders on immigration – instances of mistreatment and denial of entry are likely going to get worse.”
A spokesperson for CBP told The Intercept that the agency “strives to treat all travelers with respect and in a professional manner,” and that its officers are “extensively trained to detect verbal and non-verbal communications cues of travelers in distress.” They added that “during the secondary examination, CBP officers ask inadmissible foreign nationals multiple questions concerning whether they possess any fear or concern about being returned to their home country.”
"LGBT persons face so many challenges in Uganda, from social exclusion—that is, being denied employment, education … discrimination while accessing services that include health services—to worse: being arrested, disowned by family and friends and verbal and physically violent attacks,” said Frank Mugisha of Sexual Minorities Uganda.
In the past few days, advocates have launched a #BringEllaBack campaign to direct calls at immigration officials in order to win justice for the young woman. “Ella was traumatized,” Ahmad continued. “She couldn't talk about what she had been through. Too bad? Ask yourself: What about a small child? What about someone who's mentally challenged? A LACK of CAPACITY to claim fear makes you MORE vulnerable, not less.”
The Human Rights Campaign says, “No one should be forced to return to a country where they will be unsafe.”
