COLUMN ONE : Caught in a Vicious, Bitter Trap : Instead of new lives, some immigrant women have found misery and fear. Their American husbands try to use deportation laws to keep them locked in abusive marriages.

Hers was not a marriage of convenience. She thought it might have something to do with love, her lifelong dream of being blessed with a husband and child. And to think, it was all unfolding in this beautiful country that she’d known only through postcards.

Five years ago, Miriam Cruz-Wood came to the United States from the Philippines as a tourist. Then she stayed on illegally, smitten with such wonders as Disneyland. Christopher Wood, who runs a medical imaging service from his home in San Pedro, gave her a part-time job keeping his books.

Miriam didn’t understand many things about her new country, but she trusted Chris to teach her, and in turn, she would be devoted to him. The couple courted a year, then married in 1991. Their daughter, Katrina, was born a year and a half after that.

The violence, Miriam Cruz-Wood says, came as a shock. It crept in slowly at first, then became almost routine.

Police reports, court transcripts and restraining orders reflect Wood’s history of spousal abuse. But as a result, it is Cruz-Wood who has come under scrutiny--by the INS.

Two months ago, after it became clear that his wife would no longer tolerate abuse, Wood withdrew his permission to grant her legal residency and asked that she be deported immediately. The Immigration and Naturalization Service agreed--because as a U.S. citizen married to an otherwise undocumented immigrant, Wood was exercising his legal right.

Immigration law gives Cruz-Wood no legal standing on her own.

Now, Cruz-Wood, 30, is in virtual hiding. She fears for her life and that of her child.

The practice of American citizens and legal residents using immigration laws to keep their foreign spouses in abusive marriages is rife, say attorneys, immigrant rights activists and counselors who work with battered women.

Given the nature of illegal immigration and domestic violence, hard numbers are scarce. However, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, says it has documented more than 90 cases nationwide since the summer, including one involving a marriage of nearly 20 years.

“And the abuse is not just physical,” says Seattle attorney David Chappel, a former prosecutor who specialized in sex offense and domestic violence cases. “It is often emotional, where the U.S. citizen-husband is threatening the foreign spouse with deportation unless she does exactly what he wants her to do.”

Coincidentally, the day before Wood interceded with the INS, a Los Angeles court sentenced him to three years probation for beating his wife. And Cruz-Wood stresses that she did not “betray” her husband even then. Wood had attacked his wife at her accounting job and it was her employer who had summoned police.

“In our (Filipino) culture, the mother always sacrifices,” Cruz-Wood says. “I know that he was treating me bad, but I stay. I am his wife. I made a commitment. I already slept with him. But then I tell myself that I need to wake up and just take care of my baby.”

Wood acknowledges that he requested his wife’s deportation but declines to comment beyond that.

Before they were married, Wood, 31, had been arrested in connection with other violent crimes, but Cruz-Wood had no idea. In August, a Superior Court judge ruled that Wood may not visit his daughter alone and made a restraining order against him permanent, preventing him from coming near his wife.

Cruz-Wood will not voluntarily return to the Philippines and leave her 14-month-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, behind. Her husband, who has filed for divorce, has told her she must do both.

“I don’t care about myself,” Cruz-Wood says, her eyes red with tears. “I just care about this child. I am at the mercy of the INS to get a future for this baby. I lost everything, but as long as I have my baby, I’ll be OK. I won’t be insane. It’s just been too much.”

*

The Family Violence Prevention Fund and other women’s rights groups successfully lobbied legislators to include protection for such battered immigrants in the Violence Against Women Act introduced in the House this year.

Forty-one state attorneys-general--excluding California’s Dan Lungren--have signed a letter to Rep. Jack Brooks (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, urging prompt passage of the bill. (Despite his opposition to the main thrust of the bill, Lungren says he “absolutely supports” the battered immigrant provision.)

The Senate version of the Violence Against Women Act, which is awaiting a floor vote, does not include the battered immigrant provision, but backers are hopeful that a separate piece of legislation will be introduced to accomplish the same thing.

The proposed provision would allow such immigrant spouses--usually wives--to file their own petitions to obtain legal residency based on marriage, while still requiring the INS to investigate the possibility of fraud.

“This is a group of women that already qualify today to be here legally,” says attorney Leslye Orloff, founder of the battered women’s program at Ayuda, a legal services agency in Washington. “This is not talking about giving new immigration status to anybody.”

Such a distinction, proponents of the legislation suggest, is especially important given the public’s sour mood on immigration in general and illegal immigration in particular. And although aid for battered women is a popular cause--there are more than 180 co-sponsors of the House bill--support for undocumented battered women is more of a political risk.

But regardless of the outcome on Capitol Hill, for many such women the issue is moot.

Yoko is a Japanese woman who says she was beaten and choked during her 10-month marriage to a U.S. sailor, the same man who sent her countless love letters while he was on duty during the Persian Gulf War. They met four years ago when he was stationed in Japan; they moved to the Northwest two years ago.

Yoko, not her real name, left the United States in August after her husband withdrew her residency petition and the INS ordered her to leave.

She returned to Japan, broken and ashamed. Her family and friends had warned her against marrying an American Navy man.

“I was very embarrassed,” Yoko says. “My parents tried to hide me. I couldn’t go out. They were also embarrassed. They made up a story about me, and they just hid me. But I’m 24 years old now. It’s going to be very hard for women who were married before to get a job in Japan. People would ask what happened to me. They would look down on me.”

Yoko returned to the Northwest last month on a student visa. She will study English for at least a year. She says she stayed in her marriage, the culmination of a nearly two-year courtship, out of love. She had hoped to have children.

“I was pregnant once,” she says. “But I had an abortion. He hit me even when I was pregnant. That really worried me. I was very nervous about it, that he would still abuse me, even then.”

Chappel, Yoko’s attorney, had asked the INS district office to grant his client “deferred action status,” which he hoped would stall proceedings until Congress took action on the Violence Against Women Act. The strategy failed.

“Here is a guy who dragged her all the way here, then kicks her out of the country,” Chappel says. “It is just an awful situation not only to be abused physically, emotionally, psychologically, but to have that abuse condoned by the U.S. government, by our laws and the immigration department. It was terrible. And her divorce is not even final.”

Verne Jervis, INS spokesman in Washington, says: “We don’t make up the law as we go along. We have to implement the law as Congress has written it. If someone has no basis on which to petition, then we just can’t issue them a green card.”

Cruz-Wood’s attorney has appealed to INS District Director Clifton Rogers to delay her deportation on the same grounds as Yoko’s case. Rogers has forwarded the request to the INS Western Regional Office with a recommendation that she be granted a stay of one year.

In a letter to Rogers supporting Cruz-Wood’s case, Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), one of the chief sponsors of the House bill, wrote: “Because current law requires the citizen or permanent resident spouse to initiate the petition process, an immigrant spouse who is a victim of domestic violence is powerless.

“In short, current law forces her to remain at the mercy of her batterer.”

And this is true even if a battered immigrant has the opportunity to escape such abuse, difficult for American-born women and harder still for immigrants who might not speak English well or understand American mores.

Recognizing such situations, three years ago Congress revised the immigration marriage fraud amendments of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act to include a battered spouse waiver, which immigrant rights activists credit with saving many women’s lives. Immigrant children subjected to extreme cruelty are also covered under the law.

Ironically, before the passage of the marriage fraud amendments, immigrant women legitimately married to citizens could leave an abusive marriage without fear of losing their legal status.

The amendments require that foreign spouses of U.S. citizens or legal residents be given only conditional legal residency initially, to be made permanent after their spouses apply again two years later.

If an immigrant woman has proof that her husband has battered her, however, she might not have to stay with him for the full two years. Since the battered spouse waiver was approved, the overwhelming majority of applicants have had their legal residency affirmed.

But the waiver does not cover women such as Miriam, whose husband never attended a required INS interview with her, or other immigrant women whose husbands never bothered to apply for residency on their behalf.

As the law stands, U.S. citizens or legal residents who marry foreigners have the sole power to initiate their spouses’ legalization process. After reporting the marriage to the INS, the couple must submit to an interview with an immigration officer whose job is to ensure that the marriage is not a fraud.

Once a spouse of a U.S. citizen is granted permanent legal residency, she need no longer rely on her husband to represent her, and she becomes eligible to apply for citizenship in three years. Spouses of legal residents granted a permanent green card are eligible for citizenship after a five-year wait.

These scenarios reflect how the country’s complicated immigration laws are supposed to work. Sometimes, things go wrong.

Attorney Orloff tells the story of Lilia, a pseudonym for a 48-year-old Dominican woman who married a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico in 1984. The two lived together on the East Coast for 12 years and have three daughters.

Despite horrific and almost casual acts of violence, Lilia believed her husband’s promises during the first six years of marriage that he would apply for legal residency on her behalf. Later, he would threaten her with deportation if she reported his abuse or took any action against him.

So Lilia stayed in the family home, caring for her daughters and trying to shield them from the most extreme violence, which was reserved for her.

In 1990, Lilia’s father became seriously ill in Santo Domingo and her husband allowed her to visit him before he died. But when Lilia tried to return to the United States, she could not: Her husband had never petitioned for her permanent residency as he had said.

Her husband was having problems caring for their daughters, so he filed for Lilia’s residency with the INS. But the process, coupled with his delay, took eight months. Lilia returned home, and the violence grew worse.

After one particularly vicious attack, Lilia fled and obtained a restraining order against her husband. Orloff says Lilia’s in-laws, however, lied about the incident in court and her daughters were too terrified of their father to contradict him.

The court, noting Lilia’s “abandonment” of her family for eight months while she was in Santo Domingo, awarded custody of her children to her husband.

But in August, after getting a job and an apartment, Lilia won back her daughters in court. The final custody arrangement is pending.

*

Janet Calvo, a law professor at City University of New York, says she gets calls from domestic violence prosecutors all the time. They call after reading a law review article she wrote about the nation’s spouse-based immigration laws.

Such laws, Calvo argues, are part of the legacy of coverture, the notion that a wife is subordinate to her husband and under his control. But she says the prosecutors have a more immediate concern: They want to know how it is possible for a criminal to deport his victim and virtually make the case against him disappear.

“They are just livid, livid,” Calvo says. “The immigration law allows these people to get away with felonies.”

And from another angle, Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Breall, who prosecutes domestic violence crimes in San Francisco, speaks of a recent case in which a Chinese woman told her through an interpreter: “I’m not a citizen so he can beat me.”

“She thought that because she was a non-citizen, no one would help her,” Breall goes on. “And the real horror of the situation was that not only the husband, but his lawyer, was using her non-citizenship status against her. They were psychologically victimizing her, asking her to drop the charges.”

Although the man was prosecuted, Breall says she believes that he contacted the INS to start proceedings to deport his wife.

“This is really common,” Breall says. “I talk to a lot of women at battered women’s shelters about prosecution of domestic violence, trying to educate them in general. That’s when this issue always comes up, citizenship and what the batterer does to blackmail these victims. It’s really a nightmare situation.”

Lydia Bodin, the deputy in charge of the domestic violence unit at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, asks: “Are we in favor of men beating women? That is the threshold question. I don’t care if the woman is a Martian. Hopefully, we are big enough to look beyond that and say, ‘Look, we don’t allow that in this country.’ ”

Bodin, who says her office files a domestic violence homicide case once every five days, adds: “I get tired of seeing women coming in body bags.”

*

Carmen, a 23-year-old Guatemalan, can finally see that she could have been one such victim stored in the Los Angeles County morgue. Her fear is still fresh, though, and she cannot talk about her husband and his terror without tears.

She believes it was her American-born daughter, 2 1/2, who saved her life.

“(My husband) beat me almost every day,” Carmen says in Spanish. “My daughter would see this, and she would start crying, and grab a belt or a shoe and hit her father and tell him not to hurt me. And I thought, ‘What is this?’ I didn’t want my daughter to see this or grow up like this.”

Carmen, who has lived in Los Angeles for 12 years, finally left her husband, a mechanic who hoped to become a police officer, when she realized that a green card wasn’t worth such abuse. Her husband withdrew his permission to grant her legal residency and Carmen was deemed, in bureaucratic code, a “deportable alien.”

Still, Carmen called him later and begged him to change his mind. “But he said I would have to sign over custody of my daughter,” she says.

Carmen refused.

Her attorney, Rosa Fregoso, tells of the six hours she and Carmen spent at the INS district office in the hope that Carmen’s petition for residency, supported by proof of a bona fide marriage and severe spousal abuse, would nonetheless be approved.

“I trusted him,” Fregoso says of the INS supervisor she spoke with. “I thought if I was open about Carmen’s volatile situation, he might protect her. . . . And he replied that (her husband) had a right to withdraw the application. They had the power, the authority, to adjudicate the petition that day . . . and they ignored me.”

For now, Carmen will step back into the shadows as an illegal immigrant in this nation where she has spent half her life.