Give
Us Your Huddled Masses -
But Not Your Battered Women
By William Fisher
29 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Should
the U.S. congress reach agreement on an immigration bill, it is unlikely
to include one of the simpler issues in this complex debate: granting
asylum to battered women.
This is far from a new issue.
It first drew national attention in 1995, when a Guatemalan woman named
Rodi Alvarado escaped from her brutal husband, who subjected her to
extreme domestic violence. He broke her jaw, kicked her when she was
pregnant, wielded a machete and threatened that if she tried to escape
he would leave her wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
She did escape – to
the U.S., which granted her asylum. But this decision was immediately
appealed by the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
and overturned by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals
in 1999.
The Board claimed she was
not seeking asylum due to membership in a social group, political opinion,
race, religion or nationality. They claimed she needed to show a nexus
between the beatings and her political opinion or membership in a social
group.
She was allowed to remain
in the U.S. pending an appeal of the appeal. And she's still here, living
in California and working in a convent.
Since its inception, the
Alvarado case has become a poster child for a dysfunctional bureaucracy
charged with managing immigration into the U.S. When the INS was absorbed
into the mammoth Department of Homeland Security, it was renamed the
U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS). And to make
resolution of the Alvarado case even more complex, BCIS now shares jurisdiction
with the Justice Department (DOJ) for preparation of new guidelines
that would cover her category of asylum seeker.
Near the end of the Clinton
Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno proposed regulations to
expand the ability of victims of domestic violence (and other gender-related
human rights abuses like trafficking, sexual slavery and honor killing)
to seek asylum in the United States.
But those regulations were
never implemented. And when John Ashcroft became attorney general, he
failed to recommend that the regulations be adopted. Instead, he re-certified
Ms. Alvarado's case to himself in order to review it, since the Attorney
General has authority to make decisions on any immigration case.
But Ashcroft left office
in 2004 without making a decision. He said the Justice Department and
the Department of Homeland Security should agree on a set of guidelines
covering women's issues, including domestic violence.
Since then, both agencies
continue to claim they are working on these guidelines. Despite the
fact that proposed regulations were drawn up back in December 2000,
nothing has been finalized in more than five years.
Rodi Alvarado's lawyer, Karen
Musalo of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law
in San Francisco, told IPS, "The complication is that now both
DHS and DOJ have jurisdiction over the regulations because of the reorganization
of the INS, and there has not been consensus between the two agencies
on how to proceed."
Meantime, Mrs. Alvarado -
and others in her predicament - remains in legal limbo.
The current immigration debate
has rekindled interest in cases like that of Mrs. Alvarado. But a coalition
of refugee and human rights groups is taking a new approach: it is urging
congress to examine the "root causes" of population movements.
Responding to the claim by
some congresspersons that easing asylum restrictions would "open
the floodgates" to still more undocumented aliens, a report by
one of the members of the coalition, The Center for Gender and Refugee
Studies at the University of California at Hastings, argues that "the
solution is not to deny protection, but to look at the root causes of
refugee flows, and to craft foreign policy responses to address them."
And it is taking its case
not to immigration agencies but to a few key members of congress who,
they hope, will help them to take their message to the State Department.
The reason they want State
involved is that there is credible evidence that domestic violence is
part of a larger and even more deadly phenomenon: Femicide. And the
State Department is a major funder of programs to strengthen the judiciary
and other rule of law institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere around
the world.
For example, in Mrs. Alvarado's
country, Guatemala, the coalition says "there is violence and murder
of women with total impunity - with more than 2,200 women
killed since 2100, and perhaps 10 or 11 prosecutions and convictions.
Local media has largely ignored the issue.
Femicide is also a problem
elsewhere in Latin America. Earlier this year, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia,
Mexico and Guatemala sent a delegation of activists to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to focus attention
on Femicide.
In addition to the deaths
in Guatemala, incomplete murder rates presented to the Commission cite
373 known murders of women in Bolivia from 2003 to 2004, and143 in Peru
during 2003. In Colombia, a woman is reportedly killed every six days
by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Mexico,
two cities where the Femicide trend was first widely noticed, have suffered
the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993, according
to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing.
Globally, the problem is
no less severe. In many parts of South Asia and the Middle East, for
example, so-called "honor killings" usually go unpunished.
Leading the Femicide campaign
are four non-governmental organizations -- the Washington Office on
Latin America, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Gender and
Refugee Studies, and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission.
Three members of congress
- California Democrats Barbara Lee, Tom Lantos, and Hilda Solis - are
drafting a letter to the State Department, which they hope will be signed
by most of their colleagues, regardless of party. The letter will urge
State to provide funding and personnel to examine the Femicide issue
as well as the murder of human rights activists.
Resolving cases such as Mrs.
Alvarez’s might appear to be a relatively simple part of the complex
and contentious immigration debate now taking place in congress. But,
given the incredible rancor generated by the immigration issue, protection
for battered women is probably off the radar.