Battered Asylum-Seekers

So, did you hear that the Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States? The action reverses a Bush administration stance on an issue at the center of a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

... The administration laid out its position in an immigration appeals court filing in the case of a woman from Mexico who requested asylum, saying she feared she would be murdered by a common law husband there. According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the man repeatedly raped her at gunpoint, held her captive, stole from her and at one point attempted to burn her alive when he learned she was pregnant.

The government submitted its legal brief in April, but the woman only recently gave her consent for the confidential case documents to be disclosed to The New York Times. The government has marked a clear, although narrow, pathway for battered women seeking asylum, lawyers said, after 13 years of tangled court arguments, including resistance from the Bush administration to recognize any of those claims.

Moving cautiously, the government did not immediately recommend asylum for the Mexican woman, who is identified in the court papers only by her initials as L.R. But the Department of Homeland Security, in the unusual submission written by senior government lawyers, concluded in plain terms that "it is possible" that the Mexican woman "and other applicants who have experienced domestic violence could qualify for asylum."

As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued in the same case that battered women could not meet the strict standards of American asylum law.

Even still, I question the Obama administration's ground rules for battered asylum-seekers: "In addition to meeting the existing strict conditions for being granted asylum, abused women need to show a judge that women are viewed as subordinate by their abuser, according to a court filing by the administration, and must also show that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country."

If the abuse itself isn't evidence that the asylum-seekers are "viewed as subordinate by their abusers," what proof, one wonders, will be sufficient? And in what country on this planet is domestic abuse not widely tolerated? That's a stipulation made by Americans who are fooling themselves.

Nonetheless, this is a step in the right direction