Freedom Dreams : A hundred illegal Chinese immigrants sit in INS jails for the third year. Their appeals for asylum crawl along--while the promised land calls from outside.

In the predawn hours of June 6, 1993, Dai Bo Mei stood on the deck of the freighter Golden Venture, looking at the lights of New York City a few hundred yards away.

This is the closest she has been to freedom in America.

Dai was part of the Golden Venture’s cargo--282 illegal Chinese immigrants. She’d traveled for more than a year and promised smugglers $30,000 for this chance to slip into the United States. That Sunday morning, the rusty ship ground itself into the sandy bottom at a distance of about 3 1/2 football fields offshore. Waves of Golden Venture passengers leaped into the chilly, choppy waters, swimming toward the beaches. Six drowned. Six escaped.

Dai, one of 24 women on the Golden Venture, didn’t jump. Officers took her into the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Nearly three years later, most of the Golden Venture cases remain unresolved. Of those, 100 refugees, including Dai, sit in INS jails as their appeals for political asylum wend their way through immigration and federal courts, largely without success.

Fighting for their cause is an unusual alliance of immigration and antiabortion activists, drawn together by disbelief that the U.S. government does not grant asylum in cases of forced sterilization or abortion. They also find unjust the INS’ determination to keep the 100 behind bars, at a cost of about $55 per day per person. The bill so far tops $10 million.

With most legal avenues at dead ends, the best hope for the Golden Venture refugees is that the law will change. But President Clinton recently vetoed a foreign relations authorization bill that included a section reversing U.S. policy toward people fleeing population control programs.

Another possibility is that Canada or a Central American country will accept some of the refugees.

Today, Dai, 35, eats, sleeps and watches television at the Lerdo INS Detention Facility in Bakersfield, one of several jails the Golden Venture refugees have been scattered to. She doesn’t talk easily about her life. She shakes her head and looks down. “I don’t want to cry today,” she says.

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Several years ago, John Burgess was a burned-out lawyer studying to be a psychotherapist.

“Then this Proposition 187 came down the line, and it just pissed me off,” Burgess, now 57, says.

He walked into the Immigrant Legal Resources Center in San Francisco and volunteered his services. Two weeks later, the center asked Burgess to help out on the Golden Venture cases. “It was a tiger by the tail,” he says.

Burgess represents Dai Bo Mei and most of the 33 other Golden Venture refugees remaining at Lerdo. He’s trying to scrape together enough money to rent a car--he doesn’t own one--to make his seventh visit to Bakersfield.

In January, lawyers for the refugees suffered two deflating judicial defeats. One court dismissed allegations that the White House had unduly rushed the deportation hearings of Chinese refugees. Another held that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has ultimate authority over whether to keep asylum-seekers in jail, even though Department of Justice regulations state otherwise.

Additional court appeals could take years to run their course, but the lawyers aren’t optimistic about their chances. “We have to win it politically,” Burgess says. “We’ve basically lost it legally.”

Several of the Lerdo refugees have given up hope. Ling Shang Jing, who underwent a forced vasectomy and spent two months in jail for violating China’s family planning laws, has stomach cancer and wants to go home. Cai Qing had come to freely practice her Buddhist beliefs, but now she “is just weary,” Burgess says. Cai, Ling and two others were voluntarily deported on Saturday.

Dai was not one of them. “I’m afraid I’d die if I go back to China,” she says.

The refugees have heard that those deported--51 so far from the Golden Venture--end up in Chinese jails, where they reportedly must pay up to a $7,000 fine to be released.

Another Bakersfield detainee, 42-year-old Qu Ai Yue, desperately wants out--but not back to China. “Think about it,” she says. “I left China five years ago. My goal is to go to a free country. I’m more than 40 years old. How many more five-year chunks of my life do I have left?”

In October, officials told Qu to get packed: She was one of 12 women Ecuador had agreed to accept on humanitarian grounds. The next day, they told her she wasn’t going after all--three names had disappeared in a bureaucratic mix-up.

The nine Golden Venture women who did go to Ecuador have capitalized on Central America’s emerging entrepreneurship. Three have opened up a Chinese restaurant. A fourth works in that restaurant. Two others will open a second restaurant by the end of the month. The remaining three want to start a boutique.

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When the refugees’ immigration hearings began in July 1993, few foresaw a protracted struggle. “It was going to be 16 to 20 hours from start to finish,” says Craig Trebilcock, a Pennsylvania lawyer who volunteered to represent one of the refugees in a York, Pa., jail. His specialty is personal injury cases, not immigration.

In 1990, nearly a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre, President George Bush had issued an executive order commanding “enhanced consideration” of asylum requests by people who were fleeing forced sterilization or abortion, or who had suffered such procedures.

In practical terms, Trebilcock says, this meant that when applicants told believable accounts, the INS lawyers also argued in favor of granting asylum. With both sides concurring, the judges rarely ruled otherwise. “That’s kind of how it happened, with a wink and a nod,” Trebilcock says.

But by mid-1993 a debate was churning within the Clinton administration about how to thwart what was perceived to be a flood of illegal Chinese immigrants. A week before the Golden Venture’s arrival, another freighter dropped off 240 illegal immigrants beneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Golden Venture was the 24th ship of Chinese illegal immigrants the U.S. had intercepted since August 1991.

In absolute terms, the number of Chinese boat people--the 24 ships carried 1,800--was not high. The INS and Census Bureau estimate that in 1992, the illegal Chinese immigrant population in the U.S. stood at 19,000, only a small slice of 3.3 million illegal immigrants overall. That year, the number of Chinese granted asylum for family planning reasons peaked at less than 200.

Nonetheless, the Clinton administration decided it needed to discourage further exodus out of China.

“There was always a sense within immigration enforcement circles of an impending flood if we didn’t do something to stop it,” says Grover Joseph Rees, who served as INS general counsel in the Bush administration and who stayed on until one month after the Golden Venture incident.

With the Golden Venture cases, the INS started contesting the asylum claims, even when the applicants told credible stories.

With the executive order out of the picture, immigration judges turned to Matter of Chang, a 1989 ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals that says fear of forced sterilization qualifies you for political asylum only if you can show officials targeted you because, for instance, you are a Catholic or you had suggested out loud that China ought to be a democracy.

“Matter of Chang is a joke,” Trebilcock says. “How is some poor peasant woman from rural China going to prove the subjective motivation of why the Chinese government is doing this to her? It’s an impossible burden.”

Thirty people from the Golden Venture--less than 11%--have received asylum. That is about one-fourth the success rate asylum-seekers had in immigration courts during the Bush administration.

Only one was granted asylum based on the family planning argument. “He had a real sympathetic judge,” Trebilcock says.

What was originally supposed to be less than three days of volunteer work for Trebilcock had become an epic legal crusade. Lawyers in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Louisiana and California--states where the refugees were imprisoned--filed a series of lawsuits challenging Matter of Chang and Clinton administration policies.

Trebilcock now coordinates 100 lawyers across the country working on Chinese refugee cases. He estimates he has so far contributed 3,500 hours to the effort.

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Like all detainees at Lerdo, Dai Bo Mei wears a dull green smock with “Kern County” on the breast pocket where she carries a comb and a small notebook. When Dai speaks, her voice is soft and distant, and her eyes often look down and away. When she smiles, it is a sad Mona Lisa smile. There is also the strength of sorrow. It is later in the day at Lerdo when she starts telling her story.

She lived in the mountain village of Wenzhou in southeastern China. She married in 1980, at age 20. She and her husband earned the equivalent of $25 a year selling firewood. They also raised rice.

One night in December 1983, she was at home cradling her 7-month-old daughter--her second child--when the 20 men showed up. There was no request and no warning. “If I had known, I would have run,” Dai says.

“I didn’t know who was knocking on the door. I said, ‘Who’s there?’ I didn’t say, ‘Come in,’ but they had already come inside. They surrounded me. They all had wooden clubs, rope and flashlights. They shined the light in my face. They asked questions. I was so scared to death, I couldn’t say a word.”

The men dragged Dai to the local clinic. Several kept watch over her through the night.

The next day, as she lay unanesthetized, the doctor sliced her abdomen and then her Fallopian tubes.

Over the months and years that followed, the pain lingered, and grew.

The sterilization, botched, became infected. Weakened, she could no longer help harvest the rice. Her doctor bills piled up, and the money drained away.

Her husband, frustrated, began beating her. She attempted suicide.

They divorced in March four years ago.

“A woman lives for the family,” Dai says. “The one-child policy tore apart my family.”

The day after her divorce, Dai ran away. After leaving her children with her parents, she caught a train to Kunming in southwestern China. There she paid smugglers to lead her on a three-month walk over the Wuliang Mountains into Myanmar and down into Thailand. A freighter ferried her to Kenya, where she was stranded for six months. Finally, she boarded the Golden Venture. Three months later, she landed at New York.

Six months after that, an immigration court ruled she had not been persecuted and handed down final deportation orders.

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Not all the people from the Golden Venture have as compelling stories as Dai. Chen Chuang Fei’s reason for leaving China is much shorter: “Curiosity.”

The 26-year-old gangly young man made the trip without means or plan. “I wanted to get to America, take a look, and then decide,” he says.

The desire to live in the United States is widespread. Chen estimates that several thousand have made the illegal trek out of the country just from his hometown in southeast China alone. “Almost every family has someone who has left for the United States or Hong Kong,” he says.

To anti-immigration forces, changing the asylum rules would be an open invitation to people like Chen who come for money and adventure. If, they argue, “one couple, one child” is considered persecution, then soon hundreds of millions of child-bearing-age Chinese will be knocking at the American door asking to be let in.

“These claims flounder on the credibility issue,” says Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “You have these allegations in some rural village where no one can verify. The incentive for fraud is rampant.”

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In the back window of Tim and Terri Palmquist’s Dodge van is a sticker that reads: “Abortion. One dead. One wounded.”

Two days a week, Terri--who, with her husband, runs Voice for Life in Bakersfield--walks the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic.

A month before Dai’s deportation order was handed down, Keith Tucci, director of Life Coalition International, a Florida antiabortion group, called the Palmquists to tell them of the Golden Venture refugees in Lerdo. At the time, it appeared that any day the refugees would be put on planes back to China. The Palmquists immediately organized prayer vigils.

“For us to be consistent, we have to speak out,” Tim Palmquist says. “They’re good people. We just think it’s wrong they’re being treated as criminals in our jails.”

When Ecuador agreed to take in the women, Life Coalition, which negotiated the arrangements in conjunction with the Vatican, had to guarantee financial support for two years. In three weeks, the Palmquists raised $50,000, more than enough.

On Feb. 29--the refugees’ 1,000th day of confinement--the Palmquists held a 13 1/2-mile walk from the replica of the Liberty Bell in downtown Bakersfield to Lerdo.

Terri Palmquist made the walk dressed as the Statue of Liberty. “The Statue of Liberty,” she says, “stands for freedom: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ”

“These people aren’t yearning enough?” asks Tim Palmquist. “I don’t know how they don’t qualify.”

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Despite Clinton’s veto, supporters are optimistic. Although Clinton found the foreign relations authorization bill’s budget cutbacks unacceptable, he now supports changing asylum law so that fear of forced abortion or sterilization is considered political opinion, an administration official said.

The proposed change is part of the House version of the recently passed immigration bill. Supporters hope the change will be part of the final bill to be hammered out by the Senate and House.

In the meantime, Life Coalition International and the Vatican are talking with Guatemala and Venezuela about accepting some of the refugees.

To the north, Mark Pickup, a retired Canadian government employee who suffers from multiple sclerosis, has rallied to the cause of the eight women in Lerdo. “I think I know something about hopeless causes and losing,” he says.

For nine months, Pickup peppered Canadian officials from the prime minister down to members of parliament with letters and faxes asking that Canada accept the women. “I knew that only persistence, pestering, embarrassing and so forth would win the day, if indeed the day could be won,” he says.

In late March, Pickup’s efforts bore fruit. A letter from the immigration minister indicated Canada would consider immigration requests from the women “based on humanitarian and compassionate factors.”

June 6 marks the third anniversary of the Golden Venture’s arrival to the United States. The Palmquists plan another 13 1/2-mile walk and prayer vigil. Inside the spartan Bakersfield jail, the 34 refugees continue to wait.

“Every day we think of outside,” says Dai, “of what it’s like, of freedom.”

* Times staff writer Emi Endo contributed to this article.