August 20, 2008 10:44 AM
CARECEN25 is a memoir recalling the early years of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island. Pat Young has worked in the legal office of CARECEN since 1983.
I have already written about the discrimination against Salvadoran asylum seekers during the 1980s, but I think that the injustice of what happened can best be understood by looking at a typical case. During those dark years I represented nearly 500 Salvadoran asylum seekers, but Mario's case (not his real name) illustrates what we were up against.
Mario was a high school student in El Salvador. One day he was picked up by the police and tortured. After he was later released he fled to the United States and was subsequently put into deportation proceedings. I represented him in court and he applied for political asylum.
At his hearing, Mario testified that he has been abducted by the police one day when he was 16 years old. He was taken, not to a police station, but to a "safe house". Now a safe house is a secret location where the police carry out torture and executions away from the prying eyes of human rights monitors. In fact, when prisoners would be taken to the political prison, as bad as conditions were there, they would still breathe a sigh of relief because they knew that since there was now a record of their presence there at least they were unlikely to be murdered.
When Mario went to the safe house he was beaten by the police. They took razors and cut the skin above the knuckles of his hand so that every time he clenched his fist or tried to pick something up his wound reopened and bled. The abuse was so bad that he often passed out from it.
The police accused the boy of being a political opponent of the government and told him they would only stop torturing him if he gave information against other people. Most of the people they asked Mario about he did not even know. Tiring of his apparent lack of cooperation, the police hooked him up to a car battery and shocked him every time they got an answer they did not like. Finally, realizing they were not getting any information from him, the police dragged his beaten body onto a vehicle, drove into the city at night, and dumped him from the moving cruiser.
Mario testified to all of this. The judge accepted his testimony as true. Then he denied Mario's asylum application and ordered him deported.
The judge said that the police had apparently satisfied themselves that Mario was not a subversive and that his body being thrown off a moving vehicle was the equivilent of a "Not Guilty" verdict! Now he was safe.
As though torturers do not believe in Double Jeopardy!
Here are other articles in this series tracing the early years of the immigrant rights movement on Long Island:
CARECEN's 25th Anniversary
Teaching English/Learning about immigration
In the beginning
Refugees without recognition
Detained, Denied, Deported