Bay Window: They ran for their lives.

Khaled Zeggai: I fled from the killing, from the massacres, from the slaughter of the people.

Rosita Quijada: I left El Salvador because I truly feared I would be assassinated just as my husband and I feared most that my children would be left without parents.

Bay Window: They came to the Bay Area, begging for political asylum. But for many asylum seekers, their first experience in the land of the free is a harsh one.

Evelyn Cisneros: Good Evening, I'm Evelyn Cisneros. Welcome to KQED's Bay Window. You may have just seen Well-Founded Fear, a look at how the Immigration and Naturalization Service decides who gets political asylum. Now, meet some of the people who are trying to get political asylum in the Bay Area, in our program No Turning Back. There are more than thirty thousand pending asylum cases in San Francisco alone. But as you'll see tonight, the road to political asylum can be filled with obstacles, pitting hopes for a safe haven in America against the harsh reality of an often imperfect system. Please join us, as Bay Window presents No Turning Back.

Bay Window: They come to the Bay Area from countries around the world, looking for safety. Many have seen their families tortured or executed, and are afraid they may be next. Others long for the freedom to practice their own religion, without fear of being imprisoned. They arrive at San Francisco International Airport hoping for political asylum.

This is the story of three Bay Area people and their quest for asylum. What they hoped for was freedom. What they found was often very different.

Political asylum in San Francisco begins here at an immigration inspection. If a person's passport and visa are in order, an asylum seeker leaves the airport and is free to find an attorney to guide him through the mountain of red tape the process requires.

But for many people, it's not that simple. They ran for their lives from war-torn countries or strong-armed governments. They cannot get a passport or travel documents.

And without the proper documents, the road to political asylum can take a frightening turn because of a process called expedited removal. In expedited removal, a person must pass pre-screenings and spend time in jail before even being permitted to apply for political asylum.

Sara Campos: Here we see people who, they've been tortured, they've seen their family members killed, God knows what horrific things they've seen and felt, and what do we do? They, we require them to spill their guts immediately and then we put them in jail. And then it's practically put them in jail, throw away the key because our process doesn't work very quickly.

Bay Window: Expedited removal became law as a part of a massive immigration reform bill that went into effect in 1997. Since then, more than eight hundred asylum seekers without proper documents have used the San Francisco immigration district as their port of entry.

Khaled Zeggai fled to San Francisco from Algeria on January 30, 2000. He told airport INS inspectors he was afraid he would be killed if he returned to his homeland, a country that's been split by civil war for nearly a decade.

Khaled Zeggai: I fled from the killing, from the massacres, from the slaughter of the people. I used to work for the ex-president of Algeria. And the Islamic armed groups wanted me to help assassinate him. And I refused. I was stopped by the police almost two hundred times. Every time it's kicking, beating, cussing, torturing. They might make you drink urine. You cannot imagine what they would do to you. This is a country where your father and your mother can be beaten in front of you and you can't do anything about it. This is not a country.

Bay Window: Khaled came to America looking for safety. But he was met with a nightmare when he disembarked at San Francisco international.

Khaled Zeggai: I told them I'm seeking asylum. Five men surrounded me and kept asking me where is your passport? They tied my hands and my feet. I tried to beg him like God, but he wouldn't listen. He said, "I don't care."

Bay Window: Khaled was sent for questioning at a second immigration inspection at the airport, part of the expedited removal process. If a person fails that inspection, they can be deported immediately.

Charles H. DeMore: The officer asks a number of routine type questions, they're built into the process, and one of those questions is, goes to the issue of are you afraid to go back to the country where you're a national or where you've come from. If the person says yes, there's a logical follow-up questions: why? And at that time they get to articulate the kind of things that ultimately will bolster their asylum case.

Bay Window: Did anyone ask you why you were afraid to go back?

Khaled Zeggai: Nobody asked me. Nobody even asked me my name. They just said you go back.

Bay Window: Khaled says he became so upset when inspectors told him they were sending him home that he broke a coffee cup and began stabbing himself in the chest with the shards.

Khaled Zeggai: I remembered everything I had done just to get here. And I felt that, I felt bad and stabbed myself. I used to think that America represents innocence. But when I came to the airport I was surprised. I was surprised beyond my imagination.

Bay Window: The first hurdle at the airport is passed. But two days later, people like Khaled must pass another test before even being allowed to apply for asylum. It's called the credible fear interview. There they must convince an asylum officer that they have a legitimate case to plead before an immigration judge. Based on fear of being harmed because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. In the San Francisco area, credible fear interviews are conducted here at this Sansome street INS building. During the two-day wait, the applicant is detained.

Charles H. DeMore: Typically they're going to be detained in one of the contract facilities that we use, and we have a whole host of them. I mean we probably contract out daily with eight or ten different institutions and so they could be detained anywhere in the Bay Area.

Bay Window: Those institutions are jails.

Khaled Zeggai was detained here, at Marin County Jail in San Rafael. He remained here even after passing his credible fear interview. By law, the INS can detain an applicant until either asylum is granted, or the person is deported. Applicants are given no legal help or information on how the asylum system works. Many do not even speak the language of their jailers.

Rusty Schwartz: For two months he sat in jail, not knowing what was going on. He didn't have an attorney. He didn't know whom to call.

Bay Window: Rusty Schwartz became Khaled's attorney.

Rusty Schwartz: Had Khaled's cellmate not told him you should call one of these agencies, then very likely he would have gone through the entire experience without an attorney. He would have been handed an application for asylum by the immigration judge at a master calendar hearing and he may have gotten some help from some of the other asylum seekers to fill out this application, but he would very likely have gone through the entire process without any attorney at all. Which is very difficult to do. It's very legalistic, the whole process.

Bay Window: There was no mandatory detention for asylum seekers prior to the immigration reform law. Now average detention is about fifty days, according to a study on expedited removal. Khaled had spent 120 days in jail at the time of our visit.

Karen Musalo: The issue of the INS detention of asylum seekers is one of the most controversial and highly criticized policies because asylum seekers are people fleeing persecution and they're not criminals. They haven't committed any crime and so just fundamentally there is this question raised of why are we detaining them?

Charles H. DeMore: I think we have a tremendous responsibility as an agency to preserve and safeguard the interest of the American people, of the immigrants that are lawfully present, literally of everybody in this country. If we have people walking into our airports, we have no idea who they are, I don't think it would be prudent to put them out on the street given the threats that we know in the world that exist.

Robert Jobe: We've represented people that were detained three and four years and then they prevail on their asylum claim. There is absolutely no reason for that. And often times the denials are based on technicalities. And there's no doubt about the person's identity, we know who this person is, the judge has found his story to be credible, but the judge doesn't think he's made a close enough connection between the torture he's suffered and his political opinion. And while that person litigates that technical question, the immigration service is going to keep him detained? That is just preposterous.

Bay Window: Khaled is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. He has one more court appearance, just a technicality. He can almost taste freedom.

Ten days later Khaled is led, handcuffed and shackled, into a courtroom at San Francisco's INS headquarters.

Rusty Schwartz: Today's hearing follows up a hearing a couple weeks ago. The case was heard, the judge was ready to grant asylum, but the INS had not taken his fingerprints and so he had to go back to jail for a few weeks to wait for the prints to be taken.

Bay Window: We were not allowed in the courtroom. But what was supposed to be a mere technicality turned into a real issue. Khaled's fingerprints had cleared. But now the INS was questioning the authenticity of his birth certificate, because of the kind of form it was typed on. The service demanded it be sent to the U.S. Embassy in Algeria for verification.

A new hearing date was set for July 7. Khaled was once again sent back to jail.

Bay Window: Rosita Quijada is a religious woman. Ever since she fled El Salvador's civil war twelve years ago, she has prayed to god that she would be granted political asylum in the United States. On January 18, her prayers were answered.

Rosita's experiences during El Salvador's long and bloody war are almost too horrible to recount. She has seen two husbands executed, a son beaten, a daughter raped.

Rosita Quijada: On the first occasion when my first husband was murdered, the guerillas came to my home. They took him. They tied him up. They shot him for the first time in his temple, then on his chest, then on his stomach. In the meantime, I had been tied up, and they shot him and they left and I was tied up there. A neighbor came, a woman. She untied me and I saw my husband dead and I couldn't do nothing but cry. I left El Salvador because I truly feared that I would be assassinated just as my husband and I feared most that my children would be left without parents, that they would have neither father nor mother.

Bay Window: Rosita made a heartbreaking decision. In 1988, she left her two young sons behind in the care of her teenage daughter, snuck across the border at San Ysidro. She applied for political asylum in San Francisco, where her sister lived. In the twelve years it took for her case to be approved, her sons were not permitted to visit her.

Rosita's long wait is not unique. There is currently a backlog of more than 340, 000 political asylum cases in the United States.

Robert Jobe: It's a tragedy. It really is. Right now the system is that the immigration service interviews the cases most recently filed. But for those people in the backlog you will be waiting for an interview until hell freezes over, really. They're interviewing cases, but very slowly. People that applied in 1990, 1991, and 1992 still have not been interviewed. And during that entire period that they're waiting for an interview, they can't bring their families to the United States, their kids are growing up without them. So people's families are just basically destroyed.

Bay Window: Rosita's long battle for political asylum was very different from the experience of Khaled Zeggai, the Algerian who was jailed. Because she was not arrested at the border, Rosita was able to file the proper paperwork and apply for asylum affirmatively.

Affirmative political asylum cases like Rosita's are handled here, at the San Francisco asylum office. These cases involve no detention or pre-screening. Instead, the applicant must prove past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution during an interview with an asylum officer.

After twelve years of hearings and documents, she was granted asylum.

It's mother's day. A day that Rosita will never forget. For twelve long years, she has saved her money from her job as a janitor, waiting for her asylum case to be granted so she could bring her sons to America. Now they are finally arriving in San Francisco from El Salvador. Sons she hasn't kissed or hugged since they were babies.

Rosita Quijada: It was very difficult for me to be apart from my children. I would talk to them on the phone and they would tell me they wanted to be with me, that they wanted to be here. I would tell them I wanted to be with them but that I couldn't because my case had not been approved yet and I had not been given permission to remain here. And I prayed and cried a lot. And I prayed to God that he would help me bring them here.

Bay Window: Rosita's reunion with her sons is joyous, but the family is still not complete. Her daughter Reina remains in El Salvador. Because she is over twenty-one, she's not entitled to join her mother. It could be another ten years before Rosita sees her daughter.

Rosita and her sons can never recover the years they lost during her asylum process. But they will make new memories. And she will finally get to be a mother to her sons.

Rosita Quijada: I hope above all to be able to give them everything, everything that I've not been able to give them. My love as a mother. That's what I really want for them.

Bay Window: Juan Carlos Merida comes from the poorest of the poor in Guatemala. He became an orphan when he was five months old. When he was eight, he learned to read the bible, and soon was teaching others in the community. He grew up working for the church and wanted to be a priest.

Bay Window: Juan Carlos Merida is not afraid of struggle. He was a leader of the peasant resistance to government armies and right wing death squads in Guatemala in the 1980s. Once again he's in a struggle with life and death consequences, his fight for political asylum in the United States.

Juan Carlos Merida: I have lived so much. So much pain, so much misery. I have seen so much death. People burned, mutilated, stabbed, killed, shot, massacred. Whole towns burned, whole populations shot to death. The same people are still in power, General Rios Montt and his family. So I would not feel safe returning to Guatemala. And that history of that revolution that lives in me and has always lived in me would surface. I know that I would not survive.

Bay Window: On February 23 of this year, Juan Carlos and his wife Irma crossed the U.S. Border and worked their way to Las Vegas. There, an uncle told them about sister Maureen Duignan, a Franciscan nun who runs the east bay sanctuary covenant in Berkeley. The convent is a coalition of 31 religious congregations. Its mission is to provide sanctuary, support and advocacy to Central American refugees. Juan Carlos and Irma followed a kind of underground railroad to the bay area, and sister Maureen.

Sister Maureen Duignan: There were at least 200,000 people who were murdered during the war and perhaps a half million refugees from Guatemala. The majority of the refugees we have been in touch with have been refugees in flight from the government. I would say 98% are fleeing from government persecution.

Bay Window: Juan Carlos has the help of sanctuary covenant volunteers as he writes his asylum declaration, a description of his fear of persecution that will be submitted to the INS.

Bay Window: It’s the first step in his asylum process, and a necessary one. but it forces Juan Carlos to relive the pain and fear of his life.

Juan Carlos Merida: The repression began and it began at the church itself. The government didn’t feel that we should have the right to develop cooperatives, to develop the local agriculture. We were doing things that were developing our local communities as poor people and they felt that this was too much freedom and the government didn’t want that. They burned the homes of the people, they killed many, many people and they took many prisoners, including among them my grandfather, my uncle and his wife and children, my stepmother, cousins. They kept them and tortured them for three days. They cut my grandfather’s ear off, nose, they put needles in his eyes, and under his fingernails and they cut off part of his cheeks and part of his face. They forced my aunt and my stepmother to kill their children, their own children, before they were killed themselves.

Sister Maureen Duignan: Juan Carlos has suffered amazingly for someone his age and how he’s come through this is pretty amazing to me.

Bay Window: In Guatemala, the historical clarification commission, charged with investigating human rights violations, during the thirty-five years of civil war, found that the army was responsible for nearly all of the massacres, tortures and disappearances of the civil war.

Sara Campos: Our government was denying that there was a war there. And this is a period where people were being massacred, people were being tortured. I think we had a 3-5% grant rate for Salvadorans and Guatemalans during that period.

Karen Musalo: The longest-standing criticisms of the U.S. asylum process and the whole refugee regime we have in the U.S is that it’s not informed or motivated by human rights values and protecting victims of persecution but it’s really more been motivated by foreign policy goals and foreign policy relations. Traditionally, if the U.S. criticizes a country then anybody who fled those countries would be recognized as legitimate refugees, but if a person fled a country we were friendly with, then it wouldn’t look good the U.S. felt, to grant refugee status to those individuals because it would be tantamount to admitting that countries we are friendly with and countries we support persecute their citizenry.

Bay Window: Human rights advocates question whether the policies have changed.

Sara Campos: We had a law that was passed in 1997 called NICARA and affecting Nicaraguans and Cubans in one way and El Salvadorans and Guatemalans in a different way. Providing much more permanent residence, adjustment of status, or permanent residency for Nicaraguans and Cubans. They are still making these political decisions based on Cold War mentality.

Bay Window: While the government policies have been inconsistent, the bay area has always been known for the support and sanctuary it has given refugees from around the world. Juan Carlos found a community that welcomed him with open arms and open hearts. He plans to turn in his declaration to the INS within a week. But Juan Carlos has already started a new life, a life that could be take from him if his asylum is denied.

Juan Carlos Merida: I want to be free, I want to be listened to, I want to have a voice, with all my heart, I look for that freedom, for that ability to work, to be respected, to be able to bring my children and my family and reunite them in this country. And that is the future that I look forward to.

Evelyn Cisneros: Since our program was taped, Khaled Zeggai has been released from jail on bond. He's hoping he'll be granted asylum at his next court appearance. But what happens after asylum is granted? A person is then given legal permission to work a few months later. But it can take up to five years to become a permanent resident. Five more to be sworn in as a citizen. Thanks for watching. Goodnight.

back to top