Lawyer Charges Bias Affects Asylum Decisions

While Chinese tennis stars and East Bloc sailors have been granted political asylum almost immediately, the majority of refugees fleeing civil war and death-squad killings in El Salvador are refused, a lawyer testified Wednesday.

New York attorney Arthur Helton testified before U.S. District Judge David Kenyon in Los Angeles in the trial of a national class-action lawsuit requesting that immigration officials tell illegal Salvadoran aliens of their right to seek asylum.

During his testimony, Helton recalled a former Salvadoran government official who left the strife-torn nation after being targeted for assassination by a death squad.

The State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service initially rejected the official’s asylum application, Helton said, but reversed the decision after he took his case to a television news show.

That case and others that attracted media attention “illustrate the highly political nature of the asylum-granting process,” Helton said, claiming that considerations are “not being administered in an even-handed fashion.”

The suit by the American Civil Liberties Union and several immigrants’ rights groups also asks Kenyon to instruct the INS to give detained Salvadorans better access to free legal aid.

Helton offered an internal INS report on asylum procedures, which states that refugees from El Salvador, whose government is supported by the United States, must present a “textbook” case in order to win asylum. Refugees from Eastern Europe and other communist-controlled regions, on the other hand, need not be as persuasive.

He mentioned the defected Chinese tennis player, Hu Na, and several Romanian merchant seamen who jumped ship in Florida and Texas last year as examples of those who were immediately granted asylum.