Legal Experts Say US Asylum Laws Endanger Mexican Victims of Drug Gangs Amel Ahmed - Al Jazeera
go to original November 19, 2014

Masked men hold banners of Mexican president Enrique Peñ'a Nieto and Mexico City mayor Miguel Angel Mancera during a demonstration against Mexico's government for its handling of the abductions of 43 students. (Miguel Tovar/Getty Images)

The Obama administration’s refusal to recognize the Mexican government’s complicity with criminal groups is making it nearly impossible for Mexicans fleeing violence to apply for asylum in the United States, according to legal experts.

Mexican asylum requests have skyrocketed in recent years, quadrupling to 9,206 in 2012 from 2006, when the Mexican government, in conjunction with the U.S., launched an offensive against criminal drug gangs. Despite the gangs’ reign of terror, more than 90 percent of asylum requests from Mexico are denied, according to Carlos Spector, a Texas-based attorney who has represented hundreds of asylum seekers.

In order to be granted asylum, an applicant must demonstrate persecution or a reasonable expectation of persecution based on the categories of nationality, race, religion or belonging to a social group, as well as show that persecutors are either foreign government agents or part of a group that a foreign government is unwilling or unable to control.

Jason Dzubow, a Washington D.C.-based immigration attorney, says that the high number of rejections may be due in part to a U.S. immigration policy that is guided by archaic political considerations.

“U.S. asylum laws are an instrument of foreign policy,” said Dzubow. “They were designed to protect people from Communism after World II. It wasn’t really defined for people fleeing gang violence.”

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

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