Seeking To Obtain Asylum In The United States? All It Takes Is Torture

Buzzfeed's John Stanton reports on the case of a Salvadorean woman's difficulties to obtain asylum in the US, and her perils as she sought to provide "skeptical" immigration authorities with enough evidence of her need of protection. As the author notes, "The violence she suffered while fighting for asylum shows how outdated the system has become".

The woman's town in rural El Salvador, Chalatenango, was taken over by a gang, Mara 18, in 2014. Fearing she would be the object of gang leaders' unwanted attention, she fled. But as she arrived in the US, immigration authorities rejected her request and took her back to El Salvador. "She couldn’t prove she faced persecution back home — something that would only change after she’d been tortured and raped," writes Stanton.

Indeed, within months, she was beaten and raped, and as she tried again to enter the US, she spent a month in jail before the administration agreed not to appeal her case. Zooming in on her story shows that most people fleeing violence often lack the ability to provide "hard" evidence that they are under direct threat, needed to ground their claims.

“The law is set up to get people to fail," immigration attorney David Leopold says. "Most people can’t show a note from their torturer". 

Indeed, US federal asylum laws are "heavily weighted to asylum claims based on state-sponsored persecution". In a world where non-state kinds of violence are rampant, the current system prevents people from seeking a safe haven until they have actually been victims of crimes including torture or rape.