Refugees Recount El Salvador Terror in Asylum Lawsuit

One man told of being forced into a pool of electrified water. A teacher testified that he was dragged out of the classroom over his students’ wails of protest and interrogated for 15 days about a kidnaping he knew nothing about.

Raul Sosa Rodriguez was 14 years old when government agents lined him up with a dozen other prisoners along the edge of a cliff and began killing them one by one with machetes, hurtling their bodies onto the rocks below.

“Then it was my turn,” Sosa, suspected of left-wing ties in his native El Salvador, told a hushed federal courtroom in Los Angeles. “They untied me, and that person that I knew, he said to me, ‘You know me.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I know you.’ And he said, ‘I am going to have the privilege of killing you.’ ”

Sosa testified that he leaped off the edge of the cliff before the machete could strike its fatal blow, his body trailed by a hail of gunfire down the brushy face of the cliff. He awoke cradled in the blood and broken bodies of his fellow prisoners and lay frightened and still until the soldiers sped away, Sosa said.

By the thousands, refugees from El Salvador’s bloody civil war have fled to the United States with tales of murder, torture and family members who have simply disappeared. But 98.9% of them have been sent home again, according to government statistics.

Their stories have come shockingly to life over the last 14 months in a class-action lawsuit challenging the U.S. government’s asylum policies for Salvadoran refugees. The trial, before U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon, concluded last week.

The 5-year-old case, brought by a coalition of immigrants’ rights groups, was initially brought to force the Immigration and Naturalization Service to guarantee Salvadorans’ rights to apply for political asylum.

But in many ways, over 78 days of testimony, 20,000 pages of trial transcripts, 140 witnesses and 10,000 pages of exhibits, the case has emerged as an emotionally charged debate over El Salvador’s right-wing government and U.S. foreign policy in Central America.

The lawsuit provided dramatic testimony about conditions at INS detention centers across the country, brutal treatment of Salvadoran citizens at the hands of their government, and the Reagan Administration’s apparent preferential treatment of asylum applicants from Eastern bloc nations and Nicaragua.

After a brief standoff with Kenyon, the State Department was forced to hand over secret cables from the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador, classified reports on the activities of death squads in El Salvador and an INS report on government asylum policies that concluded that they were often discriminatory.

Other exhibits compiled as part of the trial documented the murder of 415,000 civilians in El Salvador since 1979--nearly 9% of the population--and the disappearance of an additional 41,000. More than half a million have been forced to flee their homes.

“I don’t think this case will ever get away from any of us,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Mark Rosenbaum told the court last week. “You don’t forget, or you don’t shrug off, what we experienced here. . . . This case was like an echo chamber of suffering and misery.”

Court Order Involved

At issue during the months of trial has been whether the INS is complying with a 1982 court order requiring Border Patrol agents to notify Salvadoran immigrants of their right to apply for political asylum.

Witnesses testified that they were terrified of returning to their homeland but were coerced into signing voluntary departure forms. Many complained that conditions at INS detention centers were often so bad that they elected to return home without seeking asylum.

The government contends that Salvadoran immigrants are treated no differently than other nationalities and claims that most simply fail to meet the strict test for asylum set out under the law--a “well-founded” fear of persecution based on their nationality, religion, race, political view or membership in a particular social group.

“Why is a Salvadoran who fears persecution a sadder case than a Mexican whose family is starving? Do you assign an economic value to how badly off they are?” asked Allen Hausman, a Justice Department lawyer who has represented the government in the case.

“The plaintiffs say that people would be beaten if they returned to El Salvador, that they fear bombing. That’s terrible, they say. The people who live there are fearful. You betcha they are. But is that religion, political opinion, race, social group? You see? It doesn’t fit in a box.”

Cites Different Standards

But the ACLU’s Rosenbaum said the government has different standards for different nationalities.

“If you’re Polish, if you’re from an eastern European country, if you are Cuban or Vietnamese, the country (the United States) has had an open-door policy and in fact trumpeted its generosity to those groups,” he said.

“It’s just where human rights issues complicated Administration foreign policy issues that the welcome mat was taken out,” he said.

When arrested for entering the country illegal, immigrants are entitled to a deportation hearing before an immigration judge, at which time they can argue for political asylum.

But if they are ordered deported, as most are, they may not return for five years without facing criminal penalties.

Because of that, and because of the weeks or months they may have to spend at a detention facility awaiting a hearing if they cannot post bond, many aliens elect to sign voluntary departure forms in which they agree to be deported immediately--and can attempt to reenter the U.S. at any time, according to both the plaintiffs and the government.

INS Argument

INS officials have argued that it is unfair to advise only Salvadorans of their right to apply for political asylum. Instead, they said, the INS should simply ask what they ask everyone else--if they want to be returned to their homeland immediately or if they want a hearing.

“The person who’s afraid isn’t going to say ‘yes, send me back,’ ” Hausman said. “The person who’s afraid can say, ‘I want to remain, I want a hearing.’ The attorney general doesn’t want Border Patrol agents giving advice to the aliens about whether or not they have good asylum claims.”

In often heartbreaking detail--on one occasion moving the judge, who was visibly shaken, to dismiss court early--Salvadoran immigrants who did request asylum told of violence in their homeland and rough treatment at the hands of the INS.

One witness, German Climaco, told the court that he was taken to a Border Patrol station in Almogordo, N.M., in the summer of 1984 and questioned about the identity of the alien smuggler who had helped him into the country.

When he said he did not know the man’s name, Climaco testified, the agent picked up his gun from where it had been lying on the top of his desk, put it in his holster and directed Climaco outside.

‘We Kill Liars Here’

“He said, ‘I’m going to tell you one thing, that in my country, we don’t want any liars.’ He said, ‘You know, we kill liars here.’ ” Then, Climaco testified, the agent said that unless he told the truth, “I’m going to put a bullet through your head.”

The agent testified that while he had no clear recollection of the incident, he was certain he never threatened any alien with a gun.

He conceded that it was “possible” he might have told Climaco he did not like liars. “It’s an effort to prevent the alien from feeling comfortable,” the agent testified.

Gloria Esperanza Benitez de Flores said she tearfully told Border Patrol agents in Blythe that she had fled El Salvador because of threats made to her husband, but was repeatedly denied permission to use a phone and pressured to sign a voluntary departure form, waiving her right to asylum or a deportation hearing.

All three of the agents who interviewed her remembered the incident, if vaguely. One testified that he recalled that a couple of women were crying, and seemed to be afraid. Another remembers a woman who was “quite emotionally upset, and it was kind of hard to speak to her.”

But the third agent, the one identified as the man who pressured Benitez into signing the departure form, had a different recollection.

‘Fun People to Talk to’

“They were fun to talk to. They were exciting to talk to, and they liked to reminisce and they liked to talk about El Salvador,” the agent recalled. “(They were) just fun people to talk to. . . . I recall them being very animated and actually kind of happy.”

“Some of the stories are just incredible,” Hausman said. “Like the story about the guy accused of putting a gun to the head of an alien and saying we don’t like liars in America.

“Would an officer take his gun out and put a loaded gun out on a table where the alien could pick it up and shoot the officer, and maybe everybody else in the room? That doesn’t seem very believable to me. . . . The judge now has to make a decision about who’s telling the truth.”

Kenyon issued a preliminary injunction in 1982 ordering the INS to give all Salvadorans arrested for illegal entry into the United States a notice that they are entitled to apply for asylum, a notice that has come to be known as an “Orantes advisal” after the lead plaintiff in the case, Crosby Wilfredo Orantes Hernandez.

But plaintiffs’ representatives in the case, including the Central American Refugee Center, the National Center for Immigrants’ Rights, the Immigrants’ Rights Office of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley Neighborhood Legal Services, claim that the coercion has now simply become much more subtle.

Told of Problems

Salvadorans are indeed told that they can apply for asylum, Rosenbaum said, but they are also frequently told that “almost nobody ever gets asylum,” that they will be detained in jail for several months awaiting a hearing if they cannot post bond and that they might be separated from their children in the process.

The process of applying for asylum, he said, “has been either utterly impossible or has been turned by the INS into an unfairly calibrated test of wills.”

But Hausman said that when INS agents tell Salvadoran aliens that they may be detained for months or separated from their families, they are simply telling them what to expect.

Moreover, he said, the fact that asylum applications among Salvadorans have increased from 10% of all those arrested before the case to 95% now is ample evidence that “if in fact the Border Patrol officers are coercing people, they’re doing a terrible job of it.”

An important issue from the beginning has been the extent to which politics have motivated the INS’ handling of Salvadoran asylum requests.

Varied Approval Rates

A General Accounting Office analysis from a few years ago, introduced at trial, found that asylum applicants from different countries who claimed to have suffered similar mistreatment did not have similar approval rates.

For example, only 4% of those who claimed to have been tortured in El Salvador were granted political asylum, compared to 15% in Nicaragua (the rate there has escalated significantly in the last year), 80% in Poland and 64% in Iran.

Moreover, a study conducted by the INS itself in 1982 concluded that, “for an El Salvadoran national to receive a favorable asylum opinion (from the State Department), he or she must have ‘a classic textbook case.’ ”

On the other hand, the study found, seven Polish crewmen who jumped ship and applied for asylum in Alaska were recommended for approval by the State Department, although the INS viewed their applications as “extremely weak.”

Hausman said the problem is that the plaintiff’s lawyers are trying to run the INS.

“The plaintiffs have submitted a prayer for relief that is in many ways a wish list,” Hausman said. “It represents their thinking on how the immigration service should be run.”

But Rosenbaum, in his closing argument, said: “I don’t believe that anyone can care too much, and it is hard for me to understand how the Immigration and Naturalization Service can care so little.

“That isn’t even because of anything complicated like morality,” he said. “It’s just about a little fairness.”