Immigrants Urged to Try One More Time for Political Asylum

Maria Ester Contreras, a 29-year-old immigrant who claims to have been tortured by the military in El Salvador, said she was furious when a U.S. immigration agent “laughed in my face and made fun of me” as she applied for political asylum.

“The way they treated me was very bad,” she said. “There was a total lack of respect.”

After her application was denied last year, she considered returning to El Salvador or perhaps living in Los Angeles as an illegal immigrant. But a federal judge’s action gave new life to her asylum application.

Campaign Aimed at Immigrants

Although Contreras has decided to seek political asylum a second time, representatives of the Central American Refugee Center and other immigrants’ rights groups said they fear others may not. They announced a campaign Friday to encourage the immigrants to resubmit their applications and forget the “bad experiences” of their first interviews.

“The message they’ve gotten is that they don’t qualify for political asylum,” said Linton Joaquin, an attorney with the refugee center. “It’s important that they get the message that they can reapply.”

On May 15, U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. ordered a halt to deportation proceedings against Contreras and an estimated 23,000 other immigrants who had applied for asylum in Los Angeles in the last year. He also granted them the right to plead their case in a second interview.

The action, effective over 90 days, was made in response to complaints from immigrants’ rights groups that asylum applications by immigrants from war-torn Central America were being summarily denied by the Immigration and Naturalization Service after only cursory review.

In a suit filed earlier this year, the National Center for Immigrants Rights alleged that immigrants applying for asylum had no access to interpreters during their interviews with INS officials. The suit further alleged that many interviews were conducted in only a few minutes, without giving the applicants any meaningful chance to argue that they faced persecution in their homelands.

Counseling Available

Joaquin said the refugee center and other groups, including El Rescate and the Immigrants Rights Organization, will open their offices to counsel the immigrants about their rights in the wake of the judge’s decision. Political asylum applicants have the right to bring witnesses to their interviews, to present documents supporting their cases and to request work permits, Joaquin said.

The judge’s order affects those who have applied for asylum in Los Angeles since June, 1988, when INS officials created a task force in Los Angeles to deal with thousands of “frivolous” applications for asylum. The immigration officials argued that the applications were filed by immigrants who were fleeing their countries not because they were politically persecuted but because they sought to escape poverty.

New Interview Procedures

Officials have denied that the task force processed the immigrants’ applications unfairly. But at the judge’s request, they submitted a plan earlier this month to change how asylum interviews are conducted.

Pilar Luna, assistant regional counsel for the INS, said the plan includes provisions for a “permanent cadre of trained asylum examiners” and the preparation of a new procedures manual for officials who conduct the interviews.

Despite the new procedures, Contreras is still pessimistic about her chances. She said she was targeted for persecution in El Salvador apparently because of her brother’s activities at a university in eastern El Salvador.

“I’m not very hopeful, but I have to keep on fighting,” she said. “I can’t go back to my country. There’s a war going on there.”