Carine Mbizi heard crying coming from the back.

A housekeeper at General Gabriel Kumba Amisi’s residence in Kinshasa, she usually reported to his wife, who was away in Dubai.

Mbizi followed the noise and found the general’s uniformed guards stabbing three people with knives. There was blood everywhere. She screamed.

On the general’s orders, the guards bound her and took her to a dark room where, over several days, they repeatedly beat her with police batons; stomped on her with their boots; raped her, one by one; and told her she needed to die for what she saw, while pointing a gun at her head.

By the fifth day, she felt the end of her life was near.

That’s the story Mbizi has told since she first applied for asylum, after fleeing the Democractic Republic of Congo and arriving in the United States in 2022. It was outlined again in court documents filed last week in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, as she continues to seek asylum for herself and her family, including her 19-year-old daughter, Olivia Andre, who is being held in Texas.

Mbizi and her three children, who had been living in Portland, were arrested in November as they attempted to seek asylum in Canada after losing an appeal of a judge’s order to leave the U.S. Mbizi and her two younger children, Joel and Estefania, were released in March.

The family first arrived in the United States near San Luis, Arizona, in December 2022, about a year and a half after the five-day ordeal at the general’s house, where she had worked since 2019, as described in her testimony.

On the sixth day, Mbizi said, one of the guards helped her escape, then left her on the side of the road.

Strangers picked her up and brought her to a hospital, where she stayed for two weeks, she said, treated for bruises and lacerations. After she was discharged, she went to police to file a complaint against Amisi and was told to return with a medical report. When she did, she said, the police told her there was nothing they could do.

Having heard the guards were looking for her and the National Intelligence Agency had issued a summons against her, she knew that she and her children had to leave.

An immigration judge in Boston denied Mbizi’s application for asylum, saying her testimony was not credible because of an inconsistency about when she returned to the police station with the medical report, the omission of details about a sexual assault in that report and a lack of photographic evidence.

The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the judge’s ruling. Mbizi and her family have filed a petition for review of the board’s dismissal.