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Victims of Gang Violence in Central America Face Legal Hurdles for Asylum

Posted July 2, 2010 by Leslie Josephs
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

Running from a Central American gang? Death threats? Family members murdered?

Don’t expect the United States to be so sympathetic.

Central America has the world’s highest rate of non-political crime, according to the United Nations, with rampant gang violence, particularly from the notorious Mara Salvatruchas. A big reason for the violence is geography: The poverty-stricken region is the primary smuggling route for cocaine that runs from the drug’s producers in Peru and Colombia to the United States.

But for victims of Central American gang violence or those threatened buy it, seeking asylum in the United States is a tough sell, as officials say their threats are hard to prove, according to a recent report in The New York Times.

Unlike those seeking refugee status, asylum seekers must already be in the United States and “are unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution,” according to the Department of Justice.

Court decisions in recent years have made it more difficult to seek asylum, according to the Times report:

American immigration judges, always careful not to open the asylum door to any flood, have made it more difficult for Central Americans running from gangs. In a landmark ruling in 2008, the Board of Immigration Appeals denied a petition by three Salvadoran teenagers who fled recruitment by a gang called the MS-13, saying they had not shown that they were in more peril than Salvadorans in general.

“Gang violence and crime in El Salvador appear to be widespread, and the risk of harm is not limited to young males who have resisted recruitment,” the board found.

The judges created several legal hurdles for asylum seekers fleeing gangs, requiring them to prove that they are part of a “particular social group” that is widely recognized in their home society as being under attack, something like a persecuted ethnic minority.

Some federal appeals courts have taken the same view. Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, has repeatedly rejected the new standards as “illogical” and “perverse.”

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