ASYLUM DENIED

Only a fraction of Mexicans get U.S. asylum.

As evening falls on southern Mexico, Sarah (not her real name) is shopping
at a fruit market a block from her house. It is Friday, and her father, an
investigator for the State Judicial Police, is home relaxing on his night
off. Wearing blue jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, he is sweeping his front
porch, waiting for his daughter to return and make dinner.

Sarah pays for the food just as a rush of black SUVs with no license plates
speed past her along the road. She recognizes them instantly as they pull
up to her home in a cloud of dust. Men in dark masks with AK-47s jump out
and run toward Sarah's front door. Two of them are wearing police patches.
One of them is her father's commander.

"They're taking your dad! They're taking your dad!" shouts a little girl in
the store. Sarah tries to run, but her legs won't churn fast enough.
Everything is in slow motion. She watches the gunmen drag her father out
onto the street while he screams, "Show me the arrest warrant! Don't take
me!" Sarah sees the men punch her mother and shoot her father in the leg,
before hauling him into a truck and driving away.

By the time Sarah gets home, all that is left of her father is the
blood-stained pavement. He has not been seen since.

For Sarah and her family, years of intimidation and abuse by corrupt police
officers have come to a head. Her father, a member of the anti-kidnapping
unit, had discovered that his commander had taken a young girl hostage and
that he and other cops were working for the cartels.

Sarah's father tried to bring his commander to justice, denouncing him to
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, but there were no arrests and it
just made him a target. Crooked policemen and cartel thugs had threatened
to kill him, beaten Sarah and raped his wife, but he refused to work for
drug traffickers.

After the kidnapping, Sarah and her mother rushed to the Public Prosecutor,
but officials refused to take a statement. The women told nearby police
agencies about the corruption and abduction, but no one would help. In
desperation, Sarah went to the state capital to ask the military to
intercede, but once again, she was turned away.

Sarah spent the next few nights in hiding at her uncle's home. She needed
to get farther away. Sarah had family in Juarez, and while going to one of
the most violent cities in the western hemisphere for sanctuary is like
going to hell to cool off, her uncle put her on a plane.

When Sarah landed, she found out that her uncle had been murdered outside
the airport for helping her escape.

In Juarez, Sarah met up with her mother and two younger brothers, who also
had managed to get away, and for two months they hunkered down in an apartment.

"I was living in shock," says Sarah. "I was unable to understand that life
as I knew it was over forever. I was so scared that I only stayed inside,
living in my world of fear."

One afternoon, Sarah's mother received a phone call from a hometown friend.
Her father's commander was threatening to kill Sarah's grandparents if they
or any family member spoke to the fugitives. Even worse, said the friend,
the commander and his troops knew where Sarah and her mother were hiding in
Juarez.

"I felt like my world was collapsing," says Sarah. "I did not know where to
turn or where to run."

The next morning, Sarah and her mother heard over the radio that the United
States was offering protection. Sarah had never thought of living among los
gringos; her life was in Mexico, where the 21-year-old was already halfway
through law school. But now she was out of options. The corrupt police knew
her location, and they were coming.

Later that day, December 30, 2008, Sarah, her mother and her two brothers
walked up to the Paseo Del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso and turned
themselves in, requesting asylum.

Sarah was separated from her family and placed in a detention center for
more than a year while she waited for her day in immigration court. When a
judge finally heard the case, her claim for asylum was denied and she was
ordered back to Mexico. The evidence - that cops working for a drug cartel
had beaten Sarah, killed her uncle, abducted her father and raped her
mother because her father fought against their illegal activities - was
moot. Sarah did not meet the U.S. government's standard for asylum.

If the line between the Mexican government and the drug world ever existed,
it is less distinct now then ever. Cartels take over one village, town or
state at a time, and buy police departments and armies along the way,
fighting for control of precious drug routes and dollars. Since 2006, more
than 28,000 people have been killed in the drug violence in Mexico. If
someone speaks up, he is silenced, usually with a bullet made in the United
States. Mexican citizens have nowhere to turn. Except north.

But unlike refugees from other war-torn nations who were living under the
violent thumb of drug lords and found safety on American shores, the United
States is accepting only a fraction of the number of Mexicans seeking
asylum. In the midst of a politically unrecognized war, fueled by
Americans' demand for illegal drugs and their ever growing arsenal of
easily available weapons, the U.S government turns a deaf ear to Mexicans
who are running for their lives.
In a shabby office of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center minutes
west of downtown El Paso, attorney Eduardo Beckett and his staff of unpaid
interns, who hail from some of the best law schools in the United States,
are scrambling to finish Sarah's appeal. The deadline is less than 48 hours
away, and there is still a lot of work before they can file the paperwork
with the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia.

Beckett, a young-looking man with a square jaw and a serious face, calmly
orders his workers around as he proofreads. He believes the immigration
court erred in several key areas, including that the judge minimized the
gravity of the threats the police made against Sarah and her family. His
cell phone rings every few minutes, but he doesn't answer. His pockets are
filled with dozens of scraps of papers with people's names and phone
numbers. Since January, Beckett has talked to more than 500 possible
clients. They all want his help. In El Paso, he is the patron saint of
asylum seekers.

Yet he seldom wins. Obtaining asylum, especially for Mexican nationals, is
nearly impossible.

Under U.S. asylum law, applicants must show that their government is unable
or unwilling to protect them and that they are in danger of persecution
because they voiced unpopular political opinions or because they belong to
a particular ethnic, religious, political or social group. The majority of
people who are granted asylum are running away from civil wars, dictators
or communist rule.

A major legal hurdle is that the law does not explicitly include victims of
crime, such as drug- and cartel-related violence. A key to winning is
showing that the persecutor was acting in an official governmental capacity.

There are generally three viable types of cases: police officers afraid of
being murdered for denouncing other officers who take bribes from drug
lords, journalists who write about corruption and drug traffickers, and
middle-class businessmen scared they will be kidnapped for ransom money.

In Sarah's case, Beckett tried to show that Sarah should be eligible for
asylum under the political opinion and social group provisions of the law
because she sought help from the police and military and was denied, and
because she was targeted for being the daughter of a policeman who publicly
denounced corruption. However, the immigration judge ruled that while her
story was credible, it did not rise to the level of persecution. The judge
stated that the police commander had a personal vendetta against her and
that he was a "rogue police officer," not acting on behalf of the state.
The judge suggested that relocation within Mexico may be the remedy for Sarah.

The ruling is emblematic of many asylum decisions for Mexican nationals.

"These cases are so difficult," says Carlos Spector, an asylum attorney
whose office is next door to Beckett's. "You cannot win."

According to statistics from the Executive Office for Immigration Review,
which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, fewer than 2 percent of
Mexican nationals who applied for asylum from 2005 to 2009 were successful.
Typically, there have been 2,700 to 3,400 applications each year, and 30 to
70 were granted.

By comparison, immigration judges grant asylum to people from Colombia, a
country with historic drug cartel violence and corruption, at a rate more
than 20 times that of Mexicans. Colombian refugees are more welcome even
though, as University of Texas at El Paso professor of anthropology Howard
Campbell states: "Colombia has been able to keep drug trafficking and
politics more separate than in Mexico and overall has a better functioning
political system vis-a-vis cartels."

Asylum experts concede that because Mexico is a neighboring country with
easier access to the United States, the numbers are skewed by frivolous
claims. But Spector estimates that at least 70 percent of people who ask
for asylum at points of entry have credible fear of persecution.

"When they come across the bridge, they're scared shitless," he says. "So
something must have happened."

He and Beckett blame the difficulty of winning a case in court on several
factors. For one, they say, U.S. immigration attorneys are far more
aggressive battling asylum claims involving Mexicans than other nationalities.

"The government will put two attorneys on a case with a Mexican and just
one for anybody else," says Spector. "And they appoint much more seasoned
attorneys. There seems to be a real emphasis on them that, 'You don't lose
these cases.'"

One of the most common reasons for denial that immigration judges invoke is
that the asylum seeker can relocate within Mexico safely. But immigration
attorneys point to mountains of evidence, in the form of news stories and
U.S. government reports from the State Department and Drug Enforcement
Administration, that the cartels are sophisticated billion-dollar criminal
organizations that dominate local, and in many instances, national law
enforcement. In other words, despite what U.S. judges might think, if drug
bandits and their police henchmen want someone dead, there really is
nowhere to hide. The key, then, is proving that they really want a person dead.

Campbell, who has testified at asylum hearings, believes immigration judges
just aren't listening.

"It reminds me of the Mexican judicial system," he says. "That is, I gave
these very plausible arguments and the prosecutor complimented me on my
research and then the guy was deported. It just doesn't matter what you
say. So it's not a matter of evidence, which is most troubling in many ways."

From 2006 through 2008, there was a steady increase in the number of
Mexican nationals applying for asylum, rising from 2,793 to 3,459. But in
2009, the number of applications decreased 19 percent, to just more than 2,800.

Many argue that the decline is exactly what the U.S. government wants.

"There is an institutionalized policy of discouraging Mexican applicants by
prolonged detention and serious resistance by government attorneys in
immigration court," says Spector. "They don't deal with these cases like
any others. They are trying to keep their finger in the border dike for as
long as they can, and they want to send a message that if you go to the
U.S. for asylum, you're going to get fucked. You are going to be detained
and then denied. And it is clearly having an effect."

The unintended effect, however, may be the U.S. government's worst
nightmare: additional illegal migration. The more often abused Mexican
nationals are denied safe harbor, the more it makes sense for them to enter
the country illegally, especially since remaining in Mexico may mean being
murdered.

"Let's face it," says Campbell, "a lot of Mexicans have a naive vision of
American justice. Even though they hate La Migra, they think Mexico is a
country of corruption, but walk across to the U.S. and everything works
efficiently and fairly. And so they think, 'I'll do the right thing and
apply for asylum.' And when they arrive, they're in for a rude awakening."

Judges defend the low number of successful asylum applications from
Mexicans by saying the specifics of asylum law make it difficult for them
to grant claims. Just as immigration attorneys struggle with the
requirement that asylum seekers must fit into one of the protected social
groups, they say, so do judges.

"It's trying to fit people into those categories that makes Mexican asylum
cases so much tougher," says Dana Leigh Marks, the San Francisco-based
president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

No matter how much a judge might sympathize with an asylum-seeker's plight,
she says, a very strict reading of the law wouldn't offer much cover to
Mexicans fleeing drug violence. There's no handbook telling judges that
police, informants or journalists fleeing Mexican drug violence constitute
a "social group" under the law -- it's up to each judge to decide.

As a former defense attorney, Marks is an anomaly among the country's 237
immigration judges. Most of her colleagues started out as U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement prosecutors. Asylum attorney Carlos Spector
believes this is a major reason why judges handle Mexican asylum cases so
severely. In El Paso, for instance, Spector says three out of the four
immigration judges are former federal prosecutors.

However, Marks says, "It's case by case -- it's just not something that
lends itself to mathematical certainty."

That flexibility can result in some incredible discrepancies in asylum
decisions, as "Refugee Roulette," a 2007 study in the Stanford Law Review,
made clear.

Three law professors studying four years of government data found that
judges in the same district, deciding asylum cases from the same country,
could turn up vastly different results: a judge in Los Angeles granted
asylum to 9 percent of the Chinese applicants who came before him, while a
colleague granted asylum to 81 percent of his Chinese applicants. Two
judges in Miami differed on decisions regarding Colombian applicants, 5
percent for one, 88 percent for another.

"In the world of asylum adjudication," the authors write, "there is
remarkable variation in decision making from one official to the next, from
one office to the next, from one region to the next." It's all luck of the
draw, and in one-witness cases without any physical evidence -- as most
asylum decisions are -- much depends on a judge's opinion of a country's
political climate, and how he reads the latest State Department memos.

That study also examined judges' personal backgrounds, and found that ones
who'd worked for legal aid groups or in private practice were more generous
with asylum seekers than those who'd begun as government prosecutors.
Someone seeking asylum from Mexico is less likely to be shipped back home
if he happens to land a more compassionate judge.

While most immigration judges in Texas denied about 75 percent of the
claims they heard from 2001 to 2006 (from all countries), according to the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, Houston
judge Robert Brown granted asylum 40 percent of the time. William Abbott,
one of El Paso's four immigration judges, was actually one of the most
lenient in the country, granting asylum to 57 percent of the applicants who
came before him. Dallas' Deitrich Sims, on the other hand, has built a
reputation as an asylum hard-ass, denying 85 percent of the claims he heard.

Asylum cases are some of the toughest an immigration judge can pull, with
so much to sort through on the way to determining if an applicant's story,
often told through a translator, is true and includes "credible fear."

Even when they get the facts straight, Marks says, judges forced to work
such heavy caseloads may not have the time to give asylum-seekers the
impression they've gotten a fair shake -- which, she says, compounds the
problem by increasing the burden on appeals courts.

"If you came to me with your situation, I could analyze it and in two
minutes know, 'Oh, he's not going to qualify,'" Marks says. If, she says,
"you have 500 things that you want to tell me that you think are going to
be relevant, unless I listen to at least 400 of them, you don't think I've
really heard your case. ...Even though I may be absolutely right, you're
going to say, 'Oh that judge wasn't listening to me. I had all these other
things I want to tell her.' So you're going to take an appeal."

Though so many complex questions are left to the judge's discretion, the
law says cases must be decided within 180 days after a claim is filed.
Marks says immigration judges have been incredibly overworked in the last
few years, as money poured into the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE hasn't been
matched by an investment in extra judges to handle the resulting caseload.

Associate Deputy Attorney General Juan Osuna told Congress in June that the
more than 275,000 cases before the immigration courts are "the largest
number the system has ever received." In 2009 alone, 237 judges decided
more than 390,000 cases, and Osuna said he expects even more this year. To
help ease the burden, the DOJ hopes to hire 47 more immigration judges by
the end of this year.

When deportation is as good as a death sentence, the stakes don't get any
higher. But the courtrooms where an asylum-seeker makes his case are
stripped down, with no bailiff or court reporter. Judges operate their own
digital recorders, if they're lucky enough to have them. Now more than ever
since her appointment in 1987, Marks says, "Immigration judges are doing
death penalty cases in traffic court settings."

Immigration attorneys believe judges are exhausted, and tired of trying to
be the nice guy.

"It's called 'compassion fatigue,'" says attorney Carlos Spector. "After a
while, they say, 'So what? How is your case different? We don't want to
hear about horrible country conditions, we want to hear about you and who
is doing this to you.' And they are very tough on what evidence gets in."

Working through their heavy caseloads, judges hear all manner of horrors
each and every day. Kidnappings and threats from gangs of gunmen take on
the regularity of someone caught speeding through a school zone.

"Immigration judges demonstrate a higher level of on-the-job stress and
burnout than prison wardens or busy hospital doctors," Marks says, quoting
a 2009 study from the University of California, San Francisco. Along with
the daily horror stories judges hear from refugees and asylum applicants,
"It takes its toll just on a personal level; they don't have the time to
calmly deliberate over a decision or do the research that is needed," Marks
says. "If you don't have that opportunity, then it isn't done right."

Says El Paso attorney Elvia Garcia, "Asylum is a human issue. We need to
focus on what the United States actually stands for. Judges say their hands
are tied, but I think they are afraid of political backlash."

Immigration judges work under the Executive Office for Immigration Review,
which falls under the DOJ and the attorney general. This became well known
when Monica Good-ling, once an aide to former Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales, told Congress that she'd screened Bush-era judge appointees for
political beliefs ahead of time, looking for judges who would shoot down
asylum applications.

Speaking for the immigration judges' association before Congress in June,
Marks joined the American Bar Association in recommending that immigration
judges get a special status "to guarantee decisional independence and
insulation from retaliation" -- a freedom judges today don't necessarily
enjoy, given their place as employees of the Department of Justice who
serve at the pleasure of the U.S. attorney general.

Statistically, Mexicans seeking asylum are almost certainly doomed.
However, some applicants do prevail. A case originating in Brownsville
offers a glimpse into the possible future of asylum law.

Jim, who did not want his name used for fear of reprisal, was a mechanic
and a musician in Matamoros, Mexico, just on the other side of the Rio
Grande. He had polio and lived at home with his mother. Their longtime
neighbor was a notorious crime boss. One day, he asked Jim to store drugs
and guns at their house, but Jim refused.

It didn't take long for the local police to show up on behalf of the drug
lord, and, after giving Jim a few warnings, a gang of drug traffickers and
policemen broke into his home one night and kidnapped him at gunpoint.

They drove Jim to an open field and starting beating him with their fists.
One man hammered Jim with a two-foot long metal pipe. Later that night, the
men took Jim to the parking lot of the police station, where they forced
him to call his family and demand $20,000 in ransom money. Then they
handcuffed Jim and beat him some more before driving him home. He had 24
hours to come up with the cash or be killed.

For three days, Jim hid in the body shop where he worked, sleeping in a
broken down van. When the officers finally showed up at the shop, he ran to
a family member's home, and was told the corrupt policemen already had
visited. That afternoon, Jim's son drove his father to the border patrol
station in Brownsville, where Jim asked for protection, saying he was
"desperate to avoid being murdered by two Mexican federal policemen."

For months, Jim was detained inside the Port Isabel Detention Center, 12
miles north of Brownsville. When an immigration judge finally heard the
case, it was denied. The judge decided Jim's story was not credible and
that the policemen were not acting as agents of the state.

Jim's attorney, Henry Cruz, decided to appeal, but this time he would take
a new approach. Instead of applying for traditional asylum, he would appeal
under the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The difference, says Cruz, is that under the convention, the applicant only
has to show that he will likely be tortured by the police or with the
police's consent, and not that he belongs to a protected social group or is
being persecuted for a particular political opinion.

On appeal, the immigration board reversed the lower court's decision and
found that Jim's story was credible. The board also found that while the
abuse was committed by the Matamoros police, it was perpetrated by the drug
lord. The issue of relocation was moot, as Jim's polio and care
requirements made moving away from family nearly impossible.

In the end, Jim won.

"With Convention Against Torture cases," says Cruz, who now practices law
in Seattle, "the issue is, what does 'acting in an official capacity' mean?
Are rogue police officers acting in official capacity? Former U.S. Attorney
John Ashcroft used to say, 'No.' Well, he's completely wrong, and if you
look at civil rights case law, [police] don't have to be on duty or in
uniform as long as they show they have authority. And in this case, they
had handcuffs, weapons, and portrayed themselves as officers. So even if
they were doing it outside of their office, you can't erase the fact that
they are police agents and use their tools for drug traffickers. And it
doesn't have to be an official policy of the police department to help drug
traffickers, either."

Or, as Elvia Garcia, an attorney in El Paso puts it, "It's like the Ku Klux
Klan in the 1950s. Police officers would stop people on the road and then
turn them over to the KKK. The same thing is happening in Mexico with
impunity."

Cruz concedes that he and Jim got lucky with a sympathetic judge out of Las
Vegas, and that which judge you draw severely affects an asylum applicant's
chances. However, he believes more asylum cases can be won by applying the
anti-torture convention.

"Theoretically it could work for anybody," says Cruz, "and it should be as
simple as that. Although it never is. The hurdle is showing that the person
will likely be found and tortured, so you need to have a good set of facts.
However, the simple fact is that there is an increase of drug violence
recently and the conditions are changing drastically, so that helps these
cases. There will be a lot more losses before successes, but under the law,
many more of these cases should be getting asylum than are."

At the end of the day, the reason asylum for Mexicans is so tough may come
down to politics.

The U.S. government has earmarked more than $1 billion to help Mexican
President Felipe Calderon's government battle its country's drug problem.
Turning around and granting asylum to someone fleeing Mexico's federal
police amounts to an admission that Congress has been bankrolling criminals.

Instead, whether through direct pressure, or by controlling the message
that reaches immigration judges who, after all, still aren't independent,
the United States has kept its admission rates low, despite all the
evidence that Mexico is saturated with corruption.

Calderon himself has been increasingly frank about the dire situation his
government faces. Earlier this month at a national security conference in
Mexico City, Calderon said that the cartels have expanded their operations
into "an attempt to replace the state" -- a bloody endeavor Mexico's
national intelligence service says has killed 28,000 people since Calderon
took office.

"The president even admitted they're losing the drug war; it couldn't be
any more black and white," says Campbell. "The more aggressively the Unites
States tries to stop drug trafficking and immigration, the more it creates
pressure in Mexico.

"The drugs were always being trafficked, but it didn't produce so much
violence because it was channeled through very specific relationships that
kept a lid on things," Campbell says. "It's Calderon's attempt to break up
those old relationships, with direct U.S. support, that's provoked this
four-year surge in violence and torn Mexican institutions apart. Mexico is
like Iraq and Afghanistan, in that hard-line policy has produced precisely
what they're trying to stop. The problems get worse because of our attempts
to fix it."

Earlier this month in Juarez, hundreds of local police rioted against four
commanders they accused of taking part in cartel-related kidnappings and
executions. Federal police intervened, hauling the commanders down to
Mexico City.

The U.S.-funded Merida Initiative, a broad, multi-year plan to support the
war on drug-runners in Mexico (and a handful of other Latin American
nations) with helicopters, SUVs, boats, drug treatment and public education
campaigns, has swelled to $1.6 billion since its Bush-era roots in 2008. In
Mexico, that money -- $400 million in 2008 and $300 million in 2009, with a
$450 million request by Congress for 2010 -- is going to the 80,000 troops
and federal police Calderon has dispatched to fight the cartels.

In a Merida Initiative fact sheet published in June 2009, the State
Department stressed that the project is not about fixing broken Mexican
institutions from the outside, or meddling in another country's affairs:
"The Merida Initiative is a partnership, and the United States respects its
individual partners' sovereign decisions and their different legal
authorities." As another department memo on the program puts it, "They are
doing their part; we must do ours."

Especially true, given that it's the demand for drugs in the United States
and our ready supply of weapons headed back across the border that keep the
violence burning so hot. Lumping Mexico in with Cuba, Haiti, and other
nations with high asylum acceptance rates, then, would be a slap in the
face to our closest drug-war ally and a tacit acknowledgment that our
efforts are failing, too.

"Recognition by the U.S. government of persecution by the Mexican military
and the state goes counter to the Merida Plan, because we're funding the
biggest persecutor, the military," Spector says. "And there's lots of
evidence of their involvement in the drug trade. The corruption is so
endemic, and the U.S does everything to deny it."

Complaints to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission jumped six-fold
from 2006 to 2008. Human Rights Watch, citing kidnappings, rapes and
murders that have all gone unpunished -- or even tried in civil courts, as
required by the Merida Initiative -- has called on Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to recognize Mexico's poor human rights record.

But official State Department memos and Congressional testimony, the
documents immigration judges rely on most for background in asylum cases,
paint a very different picture. In an update to Congress on the Merida
Initiative last May, Deputy Assistant Secretary Roberta Jacobson said, "The
U.S.-Mexican bilateral relationship has never been stronger than it is
right now." While acknowledging the "unprecedented levels of violence in
Mexico," Jacobson's statement avoided mentioning abuse by federal police.

For Steve Spurgin, a Marfa defense attorney and a former West Texas county
prosecutor who represents Mexican asylum applicants, the lack of security
in Mexico's institutions couldn't be clearer. "There's a complete breakdown
in the Republic of Mexico, a complete breakdown of law enforcement. It's
about as close to anarchy as I think you can be," Spurgin says. "Our
government refuses to acknowledge these problems. If they did, they'd
realize that the millions of millions of dollars we're giving the
government is increasing the violence."

Spurgin's clients aren't usually journalists or police, but business owners
who run after being shaken down and threatened by the cartels. He recalls
one client who was detained along the border after fleeing Juarez, before
he was able to interview with an asylum officer and establish he had
credible fear. The day he was released on bond, his house in Juarez was
burned to the ground.

"These folks aren't coming to the U.S. to work. These folks are coming to
the U.S. to escape," Spurgin says. "I suspect these folks would want to go
back home if they could do so safely."

That distinction is easily lost when any kind of immigration across our
southern border is such an explosive issue. "Given the controversy that
currently exists over Arizona, and the absence of the federal government to
really take charge of immigration policy," Spurgin says, "I'm not
optimistic that the [asylum] law is going to change."

Opening the floodgates to a humanitarian onslaught is the last thing
President Obama needs while he's trying to stand tough against Rick Perry
and other Republicans barking at him to "secure the border" once and for all.

Mexican officials say they expect the violence to continue to escalate, and
Spector agrees that it is only a matter of time until things get even worse.

"The U.S. government knows what is happening in Mexico and in the
immigration courts, and what is coming down the line," he says.

A visible refugee crisis along the border -- a wave of legal, documented
Mexicans running for their lives -- would shatter the government's illusion
that, together with Calderon, the United States is keeping the violence
under control or limited to infighting among drug-runners.

"It's very clear they don't want to establish a precedent of granting
asylum to a lot of people, because it'll create a flood," Campbell says.
"The fact is, these cases are being lost, even though they have very strong
cases."

Spurgin doesn't expect major change will come from risk-averse immigration
judges--nor is he holding his breath for Congress to help accommodate
Mexican drug-war refugees. Asylum law may not, in fact, be the ideal answer.

But, Spurgin says, "It's the only option we have."

It is certainly the only option for Sarah. When an immigration judge
initially denied her asylum claim, her first reaction was to laugh.

"It was ridiculous," she says. "Even despite having enormous amounts of
proof before their eyes, they still dared to deny it. I could not believe
it. Then I became angry, angry that they turned their back on me, because
if I go home I will die for certain."

Sarah is in hiding somewhere outside of Texas, but hasn't lost hope. She
believes she will win her appeal, and that she will one day see her father
alive. Two years after the kidnapping, Sarah still wakes up every morning
and searches the Web, looking for even the smallest news story mentioning
her father. She feels more secure living in the United States, but says she
will never feel completely at ease.

"Even when I see a U.S. policeman, I tremble," she says. "I am always
thinking about what happened to my dad and my family. I am always afraid
they will find me in the U.S. and kill me."

Sarah says she believes in the United States and its justice system, and
hopes the country will legally open its doors to her. She is not a criminal
and only wants a peaceful place to live. Sarah says she will "fight and
work for her safety and tranquility," for as long as it takes, and will
appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, if possible. No matter what, she
will not -- cannot -- return to Mexico.

"I will not hesitate to stay here illegally," she says. "I would rather do
that than ever go to Mexico again, even if it means illegal re-entry. It's
not that I want to live in the U.S. I never did. But I cannot go back. I do
not want to die."