The following is an online extra accompanying the feature "Within These Walls," from the October issue of Richmond magazine, on newsstands now.
Abbie Arevalo Herrera celebrates her 31st birthday at the Richmond church where she is seeking refuge to avoid deportation to her native Honduras. (Photo by Carlos Bernate)
The sun begins to sink into an orange haze as cars pull into the back parking lot at First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond. Flor Lopez Trejo, a community activist, interpreter and community advocate for the Virginia Anti-Violence Project, arrives first and greets me with a quick hug before going inside.
Next, Leonina arrives with her son and a woman who could pass for her mother, Maria, and they, too, greet me kindly before disappearing downstairs. (Both ask that their last names not be used due to their immigration status.) I’m getting some air outside before going in to hear the full story of Abbie Arevalo Herrera’s journey from escaping domestic abuse in Honduras to living in the basement of the church, where she sought refuge after receiving notice of her imminent deportation.
It takes us nearly four hours to go through Arevalo’s story step by step, with her explaining a sentence or two at a time, Leonina translating and me scribbling down notes furiously for hours after my hand has numbed.
Out in the common room, Maria and Flor wait patiently. When the 10 o’clock hour nears, we take a break and I move to a table near the kitchen, where Maria and Flor are seated. Maria has waited nearly five hours to tell me of the hardships she witnesses on a daily basis through her work at the Sacred Heart Center.
“Sometimes white folks with privilege — they don’t see the suffering we’ve endured here — they just think we come here to this country, and they don’t realize we’ve sacrificed everything because we deserve a better life for our children,” Maria says. “There are no opportunities in our countries because the governments are corrupt, so we come here because they say it’s a land of opportunity.”
Tucked into Richmond’s South Side is an apartment complex made up almost entirely of single mothers. Many of their children are citizens, but the mothers are often undocumented. Often, the fathers and husbands have been deported or have left the community to find work or avoid immigration authorities.
Not infrequently, women living in this complex and across the state and country — or, in the case of Arevalo, in sanctuary at a church — have fled their native countries in Central America’s Northern Triangle region encompassing El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in fear for their lives, often to escape violence at the hands of an intimate partner.
The region is notorious for its official corruption, drug trafficking, gang violence and femicide — deadly assaults targeted at women.
HIghlighting this stark reality are the events that led to the killing of Miss Honduras Maria Jose Alvarado in 2014. The 19-year-old was scheduled to participate in the Miss World competition in London in December of the same year, but she never got the chance.
Just days before she was supposed to board her flight, the beauty queen and her older sister Sofia, 23, went missing after leaving a birthday party. The day Maria was supposed to travel to London, authorities found the sisters’ bodies riddled with gunshot wounds and buried in shallow graves near a body of water, a practice employed to bring about faster body tissue decomposition.
Sofia’s boyfriend confessed to killing her after an argument at the party and to shooting Maria twice in the back as she tried to flee the scene. According to court testimony, the killer, Plutarco Antonio Ruiz, shot Sofia after seeing her dance with someone else. The jury determined Sofia's death to be femicide, a gender-based hate crime. Ruiz was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
The sisters' deaths focused international attention on an issue that has largely been ignored — according to a 2014 United Nations report, 95 percent of sexual violence and femicide crimes in Honduras were committed with no consequences for the perpetrators. A woman dies every 16 hours in a country roughly the size of Virginia, Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights reports.
For Arevalo, who fled Honduras with her now 11-year-old daughter, these realities are familiar. When she would try to leave her common-law husband, who she says physically abused her and threatened to kill her, he would always come find her.
“There were women in the news who would end up [with limbs] amputated or dead, and he’d say, ‘Hey, look at what’s going on here,’ and I took those as threats,” Arevalo says.
For Arevalo and other women seeking asylum in the United States based on domestic violence claims, their prospects dimmed when Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a June 11 decision in a case involving a Salvadoran woman that significantly changed how the government interprets asylum law.
“Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” Sessions stated in the case, known as the "Matter of A-B," which involves a domestic violence survivor who fled to the United States in 2014. He wrote that "the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune. It applies when persecution arises on account of membership in a protected group and the victim may not find protection except by taking refuge in another country."
Shortly after Sessions' decision, the Trump administration issued guidance instructing asylum officers at the border to apply the ruling to "credible fear" interviews — a screening tool used to determine if there’s a “significant possibility” an individual would qualify for asylum in a hearing. Immigration courts fall under the attorney general's control. Since then, reports indicate the change is being felt by immigrants at the border.
On Aug. 7, a group of asylum seekers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging the new policy. According to the ACLU, "the plaintiffs claim the new rules in the credible fear system violate the Refugee Act of 1980, the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, the Due Process Clause, and the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principles."
But some supporters of lower immigration levels agree with Sessions, expressing alarm at the increase in the number of asylum seekers in recent years.
Dan Cadman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in April that granting asylum to people affected by domestic violence "opens the door to granting asylum for all victims of criminal violence in foreign countries. Should someone who has been the victim of domestic violence be granted asylum, but someone who has survived an attempted murder be denied? Where does such a spectrum end?"
To understand Sessions’ ruling and the subsequent guidance memorandum requires a basic understanding of international asylum law and historical precedent in the United States, as legislated by Congress and confirmed by the courts. The framework for international asylum was drafted by the United Nations at the 1951 Refugee Convention in Geneva. It was the aftermath of World War II, and European diplomats convened to address the current international refugee crisis: Millions of displaced people were scattered across Europe who could no longer necessarily return "home."
The latter included families who had fled fascism and the Holocaust, either because of their heritage or other intrinsic characteristics, and political refugees who had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain.
The representatives in Geneva decided asylum would be reserved for individuals fleeing persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group.”
The last category, “particular social group,” became the protected class used by immigration attorneys arguing asylum cases for women fleeing various forms of violence.
When Sessions decided the "A-B" case, he employed a strict interpretation of the 1951 convention categories, arguing that domestic violence survivors do not qualify as a "particular social group."
Arevalo's lawyer, Alina Kilpatrick, takes issue with Sessions’ interpretation of the "particular social group" classification as barring women fleeing regions where femicide is prevalent.
“What most of my clients think of as ‘Tuesday,’ in the U.S. we would consider domestic abuse,” she says, “and what my clients think rises to the level of domestic violence is what we would call ‘domestic torture.' "
According to a 2014 United Nations report on violence against women in Honduras, the number of violent deaths of women rose by 263.4 percent between 2005 and 2013, with 606 reports of femicide in 2012. According to the 2016 Small Arms Survey, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the countries with the world's highest rates of femicide. The survey is a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
The UN report by special rapporteur Rashida Manjoo, a professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, concludes that "Violence against women is widespread and systematic and affects women and girls in numerous ways. A climate of fear, in both the public and private spheres, and a lack of accountability for violations of human rights of women are the norm, despite legislative and institutional developments."
Arevalo knows these fears all too well. The man whose abuse she sought to escape continues to threaten her from Honduras, she says. He also poses a threat to her family, whom he visits regularly as he still maintains partial custody of their younger daughter.
When Arevalo received an "order of removal" in 2015, she says her former common-law husband learned of the news quickly and began making threats on her life upon her return.
After her first #HandsOffAbbie Facebook Live video on the one-month anniversary of being in sanctuary at the church, Arevalo received another unsettling phone call from an unknown number.
The caller spoke in English: "You're a fucking woman, you should pray for your life."
She hung up the phone.
In an October 2017 speech, Sessions lambasted the immigration judges in attendance for awarding asylum on so many "meritless" cases, and called for "elevating the threshold standard of proof in credible fear interviews."
The attorney general's June 11 decision created a new lens through which border enforcement has been instructed to view "credible fear" interviews with asylum seekers.
According to a Syracuse University immigration database, starting in January of this year, credible fear findings began a rapid decline, and by June, only 14.7 percent of decisions found the petitioner had a "credible fear" — half the percentage of credible fear findings during the last six months of 2017.
If a person does not pass the credible fear screening, he or she is subject to imminent deportation and is not entitled to a hearing.
“This is very, very meticulously calculated and orchestrated by the administration to disproportionately affect mothers, women and children, and the direct consequence is death to women and their kids,” Kilpatrick says.
Trejo, the Virginia Anti-Violence Project advocate and a member of ICE out of RVA, says people often don't understand how difficult it is for a family to decide to leave their country in pursuit of a better life for their children.
“This is a scary process," she says. "Things have to get to a point for us to give up everything we know — to make a journey where we don’t even know if we’ll make it — if we’ll survive the trip — then to work to pay off the debts it cost to make the journey, all to support our families and give our children a chance.”
Once here, undocumented immigrants face the constant fear of family separation.
Trejo immigrated as a child to the U.S. before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Like other young adults who are members of ICE out of RVA, she has seen the impact of law enforcement authorities arresting and deporting family members and friends.
Having grown up in the United States, these ICE out of RVA members have become fierce advocates for their community, speaking out on political issues, participating in rallies and protests, and raising funds. They're also some of Arevalo's closest friends and supporters.
A few core principles guide ICE out of RVA’s activism. For example, the group always ensures that the person with the least privilege is given the greatest platform to voice their concerns.
“Everyone on Abbie’s team does so in their own individual capacity,” Trejo says. “We are not representing institutions, because the priority is not the institution … it’s Abbie. And people have a right to live, to fight and to fight to live.”
