Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Are women who flee domestic violence political refugees? The INS says they could be, but controversial new rules could come too late for the woman whose case inspired them.
Jan 9, 2001 | For 10 years, Rodi Alvarado's husband beat her. According to her undisputed testimony, her husband, a former soldier, beat her unconscious; he beat her so badly that she bled internally; he raped her often and even threatened to kill her. Alvarado knew that if she didn't leave Guatemala, she'd soon be dead.
Guatemala offers little or no protection for women who are abused. When she asked the Guatemalan police for help, they told her they couldn't get involved in domestic disputes. The judge she appealed to said the same thing. She made several unsuccessful attempts to leave her husband and live elsewhere in Guatemala, but he always tracked her down.
Then, in 1995, Alvarado made the dangerous, illegal crossing into the United States via Brownsville, Texas, and soon landed in San Francisco, where she found pro bono legal representation and filed for asylum protection with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Alvarado has made a new life here, supporting herself through hourly wage jobs in the Bay Area. According to her co-counsel, Karen Musalo, the hardest struggle has been living without the children Alvarado had to leave behind, a then-8-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son, who she did not want to expose to the risk of her illegal flight.
But Alvarado's status in America is still uncertain -- her case is a major controversy within the INS, and her plea for asylum protection has prompted the agency to propose a binding definition of what it means to be a refugee, to be persecuted, to merit protection by the U.S. government.
Last month the Justice Department, of which the INS is a branch, disseminated new asylum proposals. Prompted in large part by the troubling contradictions within the system that Alvarado's case brought to light, the rules explicitly state that persecution on account of gender can, in certain circumstances, be grounds for granting asylum. The rules would also set a clear (or at least clearer) framework of legal requirements for seeking asylum. The INS is accepting comments on the rules until Jan. 22. The policy and public comments will then be forwarded to the incoming Bush administration, which must decide whether or not to implement the policy.
Human rights advocates and feminists are celebrating the proposed policy changes, which would help many women seeking asylum as a result of domestic abuse in other countries. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have organized letter-writing campaigns to drum up support for the issue.
"They're a step in the right direction, [but] they don't go as far we would have liked," says Musalo, who serves as a co-counsel to Alvarado. Musalo also runs the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California's Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.
But critics say this is just one more step in a process of broadening the definition of asylum far beyond its original intent -- and beyond what the system can handle.
"We can't solve all of the world's problems through our asylum laws," counters Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "It's far beyond the capacity of our asylum system to be providing permanent residences to everybody who wants to flee a country where there are prevailing social norms that we might find unacceptable," he says.
INS officials say they do not expect the rules, if approved, to open the floodgates to a wave of asylum seekers. In the past, when asylum grounds were broadened to encompass potentially millions of victims of persecution, the agency did not receive a deluge of petitions. "There's no significant increase in the number of claims coming forward," says INS spokesman Bill Strassberger when asked about previous changes in the asylum rules.
That's because people have to make it to the U.S. first before they can apply (and very few have the means to get here), they don't want to get here or they lack awareness that the option exists. In 1999, 42,000 asylum claims were filed with the INS and 13,500 were granted. And it's not as easy as simply being a woman from a country with backward attitudes toward women. Each person applying for asylum has to prove his or her individual case, that she has a "well-founded fear" of torture or death if she were to go back home.
In addition to granting asylum to women entering the U.S., if enacted the regulations would also protect women living here as temporary residents whose husbands get into trouble for abusing them on U.S. soil. Currently, the wife's immigration status is often tied to her husband's, so she is forced to leave the country if he is deported for a domestic violence conviction. INS statistics show that about 300 men are deported as abusers each year.
But the incoming Bush administration might not put the rules into effect. "It is not unusual at all for the incoming new administration to yank all of the regulations or other pending matters that have not been finalized," Musalo cautions. Though she is ambivalent about the proposed rules, she finds the timing of their release even more distressing. A Bush aide said the administration would wait until Bush takes office before reviewing the INS's proposed policy.
Strassberger says he feels the INS has done the proper work in preparing the rules to ensure that they will meet bipartisan approval. But the rules would not necessarily help Alvarado. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled against her appeal, and Alvarado's case is currently awaiting last-minute review by outgoing Attorney General Janet Reno. If Reno does not reverse or vacate that decision, Alvarado could be deported. "The person whose plight brought attention to the gaps in protection and caused this whole very controversial process to take place and to actually bear fruit, wouldn't it be ironic if [she] didn't benefit?" Musalo asks.
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