My great-grandmother, at age 18, emigrated alone from Poland in 1907.
When I was a child, I remember her daughter, my grandmother, talking about displaced persons whom other Polish-American neighbors and family members sponsored in Buffalo, New York, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In 1948, President Truman had signed the Displaced Persons Act, which was the first time in U.S. history that Congress stipulated its federal refugee policy. The law was in response to the end of World War II, which left millions without homes throughout Eastern Europe — many of whom feared returning to their towns and to communist rule. As refugees, they had no other option but to flee their countries, and the United States provided a certain number of them with a new homeland.
Three years later, in 1951, the U.S. signed the United Nations Convention Concerning the Status of Refugees, a treaty that stipulated five grounds for asylum in any nation that signed on: race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
On Aug. 26, 2014, the Board of Immigration Appeals issued a precedent-setting decision recognizing that domestic violence could be a tenet for applying for asylum and that women who flee a country with systemic domestic abuse could be considered “a particular social group.” That same year, the United Nations reported that 95 percent of cases of sexual violence and femicide in Honduras were never even investigated.
However, asylum isn’t something easily obtained. Asylum seekers need to supply corroboration of their stories, and in the case of domestic violence, that could mean obtaining hospital records or affidavits from family members. They also need to show that they can’t get governmental protection from their abusive husbands. They present their case in front of immigration judges who work for the Justice Department, not the independent judicial branch.
This June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who oversees the Justice Department, overturned the 2014 decision.
For women such as domestic violence survivor Abbie Arevalo Herrera, who has been given sanctuary at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond rather than face deportation to Honduras, the Justice Department’s oversight of cases and the fact that gender and domestic violence aren’t specified in asylum law further complicate finding the safe harbor they seek.
As we approach Domestic Violence Awareness Month in October, Congress could choose to amend the asylum law to include the terms “gender” and “domestic violence,” as was suggested by Douglas Ligor and Lisa Jaycox in a commentary for The Hill on June 25.
As a country, we need to decide, once and for all, if gender-based persecution is grounds for asylum.
