DES MOINES, Iowa — Five years ago, a federal immigration judge refused to grant political asylum to a Guatemalan woman who had fled to America after years of severe battery by her husband.

The judge didn’t doubt her story, but said she couldn’t claim membership in a particular social group that had a well-founded fear of persecution in her homeland, as asylum claims require. The judge deemed the ongoing abuse of Aminta Cifuentes to be arbitrary criminal acts by her husband.

Her lawyers appealed, saying that Cifuentes, who now lives in Missouri, was vulnerable to persecution in Guatemala simply by virtue of being a married woman who could not escape her spouse. And late last month, in a ground-breaking ruling with particular importance to women fleeing domestic violence abroad, the U.S. Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals agreed.

The board is the nation’s highest immigration court.

Acknowledging Cifuentes had no recourse since Guatemalan police and government wouldn’t protect her, the board said she qualifies for political asylum and remanded the case back to the immigration judge.

Political asylum is different from other claims for immigration or refugee status. A person has to demonstrate that his or her race, nationality, religion, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group” provide a well-founded fear of persecution in a home country – and that the home government is unable or unwilling to provide protection.

Even after Cifuentes’ husband broke her nose, threw burning paint thinner on her and raped her, police refused to intervene in what they called a domestic dispute. She fled to another city, but her husband tracked her down. So in 2005, she brought her two kids to the United States without documentation.

The ruling applies, strictly speaking, only to Guatemalan married women who cannot escape their spouses. But judges will now have to apply the same principle to other cases, according to attorney Blaine Bookey, the associate director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California’s Hastings College of Law. The center helped attorneys on the case and filed a friend of the court brief. It provides legal help to lawyers, and litigates gender-based asylum cases.

Bookey says attorneys dealing with gender-based asylum claims have been awaiting a ruling like this for 15 years. Though individual immigration judges have granted domestic violence-based asylums, there hasn’t been a precedent setting ruling upholding them by the Board of Appeals. The matter has gone back and forth between different attorneys general under different presidential administrations.

Last week, in the wake of the Cifuentes ruling, Bookey was in Artesia, New Mexico, serving as co-counsel in two other successful asylum cases. She said at least half of the 300 women interviewed at that detention facility said they were victims of domestic violence.

This ruling comes amid calls for accelerated deportations along the Southwestern border, where thousands of women and children have entered illegally and been detained this summer. Judges will now need to consider this new standard when deciding on asylum applications.

The anti-immigration organization FAIR – Federation for American Immigration Reform – slams the ruling for what spokesman Bob Dane called “the systematic whittling away of the original intent and definition of asylum.” The group fears a flood of new asylum cases.

Bookey calls the fear unjustified. Other countries, like Canada, already accept domestic violence-based asylum claims and haven’t had a glut of them, she pointed out. She also called FAIR’s stance “totally unprincipled,” noting, “Our refugee system is not set up to count numbers.”

If domestic violence victims have suffered assaults, trauma and fear for their lives just like people facing ethnic genocide, then what difference should it make to our granting them sanctuary that their tormenters were their husbands?

The U.S. has its own problems with domestic abuse and at times a lack of enforcement. But the weight of public pressure can now get someone like Ray Rice, who is filmed dragging his unconscious wife-to-be out of an elevator, booted from the Baltimore Ravens and suspended from the NFL. Guatemalan women don’t have the same expectation of protection.

Of course, as Bookey points out, the long-term answer is to try to use our global influence and foreign aid to try to attack the root causes of gender-based violence wherever it occurs. In the meantime, our doors should be open to those victims.

— McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

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