Desperate Crossings: Seeking Refuge in America: Seeking Refuge in America by Norman L. Zucker & Naomi Flint Zucker

Author:Norman L. Zucker & Naomi Flint Zucker [Zucker, Norman L. & Zucker, Naomi Flint]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781315480954
Google: OLcYDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 32206872
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1996-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

A General Accounting Office study found that this foreign policy bias pervaded asylum decisions even when the applicant had been subjected to torture. Torture victims from El Salvador had an approval rate of 4 percent, from Nicaragua 15 percent, from Iran 64 percent, and from Poland 80 percent.31

But Salvadorans confronted a wall far more impenetrable than an inept bureaucracy and doctrinaire policy makers. That wall was the refugee law itself and the definition on which it is based. While a number of Central Americans did fear persecution, many others feared civil war, with its attendant dangers. Dr. Edelberto Torres-Rivas, a Guatemalan scholar, has described their plight:

Central American refugees often are not persecuted for reasons of religion, race, or political opinion. Generally speaking, the problem is not one of convictions per se, rather something much more basic and thus much more tragic: having to save one’s life without even knowing why it is endangered.32

Refugee law did not address their condition. Government policy makers chose to ignore it. Only a small group of private citizens, acting outside of the legal system, responded. In July of 1980, while Cubans and Haitians were paying for small boats to carry them over the water to South Florida, Central Americans were paying coyotes, smugglers of undocumented entrants, to carry them over the desert to the southwestern states. One coyote, having collected his fees from twenty-six Salvadorans, abandoned them without water in the Arizona desert, just outside of Tucson. Half of the Salvadorans died; the others survived by drinking aftershave, deodorant, even their own urine.33 Church members in the area assisted the survivors but were horrified by the stories they told. When the Salvadorans were arrested, Tucson churches raised money to pay for their bond and for legal assistance so that they could plead their cases for asylum.

The INS fell back on its established practices, curtailing the rights of detained asylum seekers to due process, including the right to speak with a legal representative. One of those legal representatives was Jim Corbett, a rancher with a graduate degree in philosophy from Harvard, tough, contentious, and moral. While Corbett was at the Nogales jail, interviewing a Salvadoran, he learned of other Salvadorans in detention who also needed representation. Corbett left the jail to obtain the G-28 forms that they could sign, naming him their legal representative. When he returned, he was told that all the Salvadorans had been moved; the INS refused to disclose where they had been moved to.34 Similarly, at a detention center in Southern California, the INS was keeping paralegals from their clients. When Corbett visited Mexican jails, he found Salvadorans with strong claims who, when they had approached the US border and tried to ask for political asylum, had been turned over to the Mexican authorities to be returned to El Salvador.35

Corbett needed help and turned to John Fife, pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson. Fife’s congregation was soon joined by other religious bodies—in California; Washington, D.C.; Ohio; and New York—which formed a

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