Passing Judgment on Tales of Woe

Mercedalia Diaz was tired of being an illegal immigrant, living in fear of arrest and separation from her young son. So she filed an application to work legally in the United States -- in effect, turning herself in.

After a permit was denied, Diaz landed here, in U.S. Immigration Court in Los Angeles, nervously fielding questions from a federal judge: If you don’t get permanent residency, would you agree to leave the U.S. voluntarily? Do you promise not to return without a visa? What would you do with your son?

Fidgeting with her hands, Diaz responded in Spanish, through an interpreter.

“My son was born here,” the 29-year-old mother said. “I want the best for him. I don’t want him to go through what I went through.”

Then Diaz told her story to Judge Bruce J. Einhorn, beginning with her decision, 15 years ago, to illegally cross the border into the United States with her brother because her parents couldn’t afford to send them to school.

It is Einhorn’s job to hear tales of desperation from the immigrants who fill the wooden benches of his courtroom. Many have broken the law by covertly crossing into the United States or staying here after their visas expire. Some are seeking asylum, saying they face death or torture in their homelands.

Once here, most have the same goal: to avoid deportation. The odds of success are slim -- last year, in nearly 85% of cases nationwide, judges ordered immigrants to leave.

Many, like Diaz, plead less for justice than for mercy.

She was among dozens to appear in Einhorn’s downtown courtroom over two weeks this summer. Her case and others in the Los Angeles immigration court system -- one of the busiest in the U.S., with 17,000 new cases filed last year -- offer a glimpse into the motivations and frustrations of those who seek to legalize their presence here.

As judges go, Einhorn, 51, is informal. He teases attorneys, talks baseball and occasionally sprinkles his speech with Spanish phrases. A 16-year veteran of the court, Einhorn is bound by immigration case law. But he has some discretion.

In that narrow opening, Diaz and others place their hopes. To win legal residency, Diaz has to prove to Einhorn that she has lived here at least 10 years, that she has “good moral character” and that her deportation would cause her son “exceptional and extremely unusual” hardship.

She told the judge that she had never committed a serious crime and had worked steadily -- earning about $20,000 a year as a house and office cleaner. She recently bought a house in Santa Ana, and every month sends about $200 home to her parents in Mexico, she said. But Diaz hadn’t brought proof that she was a homeowner or taxpayer.

“You know I don’t make house calls?” Einhorn said.

“Yes, I know,” she responded, looking down.

Diaz wavered when asked what she would do with her son Edwin, 4, if she were deported. First she said she had arranged for a niece to raise him, then that she would take him with her, then that she didn’t know what she would do.

In Mexico, Diaz said, they would have to live with her parents, without running water.

“You don’t think you could clean houses in Mexico?” Einhorn asked.

“No, there is not enough money,” she said.

Diaz left dejected. She was sure the judge’s questions pointed to deportation, although the formal decision isn’t likely to come until a November hearing. Outside the courtroom, she hugged Edwin, mentally questioning her decision to come forward.

“You have illusions that you are going to be able to get your papers,” she said. “When you get to court, it’s different.... It’s not that easy.”

*

Ask Filadelphia Sanchez why she most wants to stay in the United States, and she doesn’t hesitate: It is for her two children, 12-year-old Christian and 4-year-old Emily Salas.

Just over a year ago, Christian saw his 8-year-old brother struck and killed by a car as the two were walking home from school. Since then, to cope with his sadness, he has been seeing a therapist -- a service the family fears would be hard to find in Mexico.

But Sanchez didn’t get a chance to talk to the judge about that. As a matter of law, the only thing that mattered was her prior criminal conviction.

In 1998, eight years after Sanchez illegally crossed the border at San Ysidro, police responded to a neighbor’s call about a fight between Sanchez and her husband, Ruben Salas. She was arrested and later pleaded guilty to hitting Salas, landing her in Orange County jail for three days.

“The marriage was young,” said Salas, who owns a seafood restaurant in Ontario. “We weren’t at all as we are now.”

Later, Sanchez’s father, a green-card holder, applied for permanent residency on her behalf. It was denied. She was in court on this day as a last resort, hoping the judge would allow her to stay with her family.

As Christian sat in the front row, Einhorn made clear he could not help her. According to an appellate court decision, an illegal immigrant convicted of domestic violence cannot not stay in the U.S. legally.

Einhorn dictated the Sanchez decision into a tape recorder: “She is now present in the United States without permission in violation of the immigration laws of the United States.”

As Emily leaned against her, Sanchez, 31, put her head in her hands and cried. With teary eyes, Christian looked up at his father beside him. Hearing the boy’s muffled sobs, the court clerk motioned to Salas to take him into the hallway.

The judge turned to the government attorney. “We’re not here to break the hearts of children,” he said.

*

Seven years after he left the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and four years after he filed an application for asylum, Revaz Cotsiridze, 33, sat between his attorney and a Russian interpreter for what he hoped would be his final court hearing.

His aim: never to meet up again with the Georgian police. In court papers, he laid out a harrowing account of harassment, threats and beatings at the hands of authorities in his homeland.

He could hardly have happened upon a more knowledgeable judge: Einhorn helped draft the nation’s first asylum law.

Einhorn said he had carefully read Cotsiridze’s account, along with a U.S. State Department report on Georgia, which cited arbitrary arrests, life-threatening prison conditions and law enforcement corruption.

The judge’s words sounded encouraging -- until he noted a technical problem. Cotsiridze had failed to file for asylum within a year of arrival, as is generally required.

Cotsiridze listened intently to his interpreter, staring straight ahead. “I was scared,” he said later. “I thought he would send me home to Georgia. I cannot go to Georgia.”

His troubles with Georgian police began in the late 1990s, according to his application, when he tried to intervene with authorities on behalf of an elderly man being evicted from an apartment and a starving boy whom he sheltered at his auto body shop. Both were yezids, members of a persecuted ethnic minority.

After Cotsiridze reported the poor living conditions at a yezid camp to a human rights organization, he said, police interrogated him.

“They threw me on the floor, kicking me with heavy boots. One of the interrogators opened the window and said that if I shall not cooperate with them, they will throw me out of the window to my death.”

After being released, Cotsiridze wrote, he complained to the Georgian parliament. Police tracked him down again, punching and kicking him until he was unconscious.

In February 1999, Cotsiridze got a U.S. tourist visa. He overstayed the visa in hopes of eventually winning asylum. But because he had not applied in time, it seemed out of reach.

Cotsiridze’s attorney, Reynold Finnegan, proposed an alternative called “withholding of removal.” The U.S. wouldn’t deport him to Georgia, but Cotsiridze would have limited rights -- no automatic eligibility for a green card or ability to legalize family members.

Cotsiridze was willing, and so was Einhorn.

“You are not going back to Georgia,” Einhorn said. “I don’t want you to worry about that. I wish you well.”

*

The Kenyan woman’s voice quavered. Her hands trembled.

“I need the details,” Einhorn told her. “God and the devil and this case are all in the details.”

Her story began in 1998, she said through a Swahili interpreter, when her husband by an arranged marriage became the head of a religious cult. She said he returned from “religious training” a different man -- demanding and violent.

“He was forcing me into another religion,” she answered. “He wanted me to be circumcised.”

“Did he ever beat you?” Einhorn asked.

“Many times,” she said, adding later: “He used his hands, sticks, you name it.”

On this day, the 39-year-old woman was asking for asylum, saying her husband -- a former government security official -- had threatened to kill her. Fearful that he might find her in the U.S., she asked that her name not be published.

Under Einhorn’s questioning, the woman described what she had heard about female circumcision: In villages, not hospitals, girls as young as 10 were sprayed with sand and flour, dipped in water and given something for the pain. Then two villagers cut them with a knife.

Female genital mutilation is against the law in Kenya but remains widespread, according to a U.S. State Department report presented as evidence.

Fearing that religious group leaders would take both her and her daughter by force, she fled her village in 1999 while her husband was gone.

“The police wouldn’t offer me any help,” she said, adding that she reported him four times. “They wanted a bribe.”

By 2000, she was living in Nairobi, running a tailor’s shop. Her husband tracked her down and beat her, she said. She escaped through a back door. Her shop was later set on fire.

“I went into hiding,” she said.

She sent her daughter, then 13, to stay with a woman she had met through church. Her husband continued to search for her, she said, even going to the woman’s hometown and threatening her mother’s life.

A few times during the hearing, Einhorn asked if she needed a break. Each time, she shook her head.

After attorneys for the woman and the U.S. government finished their questioning, Einhorn said he would issue a written ruling. He set a hearing date for September.

Looking directly into the woman’s eyes before he ended the court session, however, Einhorn said he was “strongly leaning” toward granting asylum.

“This court,” he said, “is convinced of this case.”