March 17, 2004

Will Bush Administration Expand Asylum Loophole . . . Again?

As if asylum in the United States isn’t already a generous enough racket for illegal aliens, the Treason Lobby is salivating at the possibility that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Secretario Ridge will open the door even wider by making “gender persecution” and domestic violence grounds for asylum.

If the Attorney General caves in on this issue, any foreign national who has ever been hit or abused by their spouse in their home country could show up at any United States port of entry and apply for political asylum. And they just might get it!

And once the lucky aliens use their newly-won refugee status in order to adjust to lawful permanent resident status—getting a brand new green card on a silver platter – guess who’s the first person they could legally file another immigrant petition for?

You guessed it—their spouse! (Plus, of course, the usual chain migration of relatives.)

With this new open borders dream within reach, a motley crew of usual suspects including something called the “The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies” [contact them] have lined up to press the issue. As if on cue, the Treason Lobby has jumped on the bandwagon for the case of one particular Guatemalan illegal alien woman, and also lobbying for an unprecedented expansion of refugee and asylum law.

According to a report in the Washington Times:

“Briefs drafted by the Harvard Law School Immigration and Refugee Clinic in the case were signed by several groups, including the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the National Organization for Women, the Concerned Women for America and the International Rescue Committee, along with various Catholic, Jewish and Protestant church organizations.” [Groups support bid for asylum, by Jerry Seper, The Washington Times, Mar. 12, 2004]

Consider that this entire armada is arrayed against the federal government in support of one illegal alien named Rodi Alvarado Pena, who snuck into the United States through Brownsville, Texas, in 1995.

Consider also that the true believers of the open borders immigration bar have never met an illegal alien that they didn’t like—or wouldn’t try to ram into one of the five “protected grounds” for asylum.

So let’s take a reality check here and see what Congress actually set as the standard for asylum in the United States.

Under current immigration law, an alien must meet the definition of a refugee in order to qualify for asylum. The alien must demonstrate “persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”— a.k.a. the five “protected grounds” for asylum.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Over the years, with much prodding by the Treason Lobby and the federal courts, the alien-friendly asylum officer corps of the former INS—now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) division—and the litigation bureaucracy of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) Immigration Court system have seen to it that the asylum floodgates remain open . . . and that the standards of asylum are ever-expanding.

Pena’s handlers have already demonstrated their mastery of the EOIR litigation bureaucracy by keeping her immigration case going around in circles for nine years now.

Back in 1995, they got the ball rolling by convincing Mimi Schooley Yam—an EOIR Immigration Judge in San Francisco—to grant asylum to Pena based on testimony of physical abuse at the hands of her husband in Guatemala. [Note: Wife-beating is, of course, illegal in Guatemala.]

The EOIR’s appellate body, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), reversed Yam’s decision. But former Attorney General Janet Reno threw out the BIA decision and proposed a special rule based on the case. The rule thankfully has languished without becoming final.

Attorney General Ashcroft took the case back under advisement in order to issue a new decision in place of the BIA’s ruling. And now the Treason Lobby is pulling out all the stops hoping that the Attorney General creates an asylum loophole big enough to drive a marijuana-packed eighteen-wheeler through.

If anyone in the world who claims to be a victim of domestic violence can become an asylum applicant in the United States, and files an application with the USCIS or EOIR, the potential for fraud and abuse would be monumental.

Now that family values such as drunkenness and the abandoning of wives are commonplace in the “New America,” Asylum fraud by domestic violence won’t be far behind.

Considering the perennial top asylee-sending countries in the United States—China, India, Colombia, Haiti, Albania, Somalia, Russia – it might be easier to count the people NOT eligible for asylum under a new “gender persecution” or “domestic violence” standard, rather than those who are.

President Bush could and should stop this madness before it starts.

But will he?

Juan Mann [send him email] is a lawyer and the proprietor of DeportAliens.com.