Wednesday, June 10, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
RIGHTS: Refugee Activists Await U.S. Decision on Domestic Abuse
Haider Rizvi
- After years of beatings at the hands of her husband in Bangladesh, Yasmin could not take it any more. One day, without telling him, she bought a plane ticket and flew to New York.
In her new city she has worked as a housemaid, baker and sales clerk, for wages as low as three dollars an hour. The 40-year-old lives in constant fear of deportation, a threat that she carries from one employer to the next.
"I wish I had not lost my passport," says Yasmin, who now runs a small deli. "When I came here I knew nobody. I gave my passport to a Pakistani man who promised to help me with the work authorisation. He got two thousand dollars and disappeared."
She says she has been cheated by many employers, simply because she does not have a bank account in her own name. A man she considered a younger brother robbed her of twenty thousand dollars after she deposited the money in his name.
"Maybe this is my fate," Yasmin says in a tone filled with despair. "But this should not be happening to women."
Throughout her 11-year stay, Yasmin never knew that she could be eligible to seek asylum as a victim of gender violence, a legal possibility available in the United States to women who fled their home countries.
By contrast, Rodi Alvarado, who left Guatemala in 1995 for similar reasons, applied for asylum in the United States. She was granted the status after failing to obtain justice from the Guatemalan courts after 10 years of beating and rape by her husband.
But Alvarado lost her refugee status after U.S. immigration authorities challenged the judge’s decision in the Board of Immigration Appeals, which rejected the grant of asylum because her abuse was "not perpetrated by a government" and because she did not belong to a particular "social group" facing persecution.
However Janet Reno, the then attorney general, overruled the board’s decision while proposing new rules that made it clear "gender-related" persecution could be the basis of an asylum claim. Alvarado’s application was again accepted.
But her victory did not last long because of the change in government in 2000. Early this year, John Ashcroft, the new conservative attorney general, indicated that he would not go along with Reno’s policy on gender-related asylum.
Apparently driven by concerns over national security, which had already caused a tightening to immigration policies in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Justice Department has forwarded proposed regulations to the Department of Homeland Security.
Both departments are expected to finalise the new policy soon, according to activists.
The Justice Department did not return calls for comments on the status of Alvarado’s case or on the proposed changes to the asylum rules.
The 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees and the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act define a refugee as a person "who is unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion".
Legal experts say while "gender" is not specified as a category, women who face gender-based violence might fit in any of the five categories.
They cite the United Nations Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, which promote "acceptance of the principle that women fearing persecution or severe discrimination on the basis of their gender should be considered a member of a social group for the purposes of determining refugee status".
Currently, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Ireland, South Africa and Canada recognise gender-based asylum claims according to U.N. guidelines.
But not the United States.
"That shows a fair amount of bias against women," Doniece Sandoval of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, a San Francisco-based non-profit national organisation, told IPS. "It’s incredibly confusing for the courts. It’s confusing the judges."
"This would be an incredible step backwards," said Karen Musalo, director of the California-based Centre for Gender and Refugee Studies. "This would be a repudiation of our commitment to protecting women who are fleeing violations of their human rights."
Rosalba Aguirre-Cervantes, 18, fled Mexico in 1999 after multiple beatings by her father, who would torture her with horsewhips, tree branches and fists. In Los Angeles, she fought her possible deportation for about two years until a three-judge panel ruled in 2001 that she could stay in the United States.
Refugee right advocates celebrated the decision because it set a legal precedent for domestic violence as grounds for asylum. But their triumph proved to be very short-lived.
Soon afterwards, the immigration service sought and won a second hearing. But before it could occur, her father was killed and the case was remanded to the Appeals Board without a decision. That erased the legal precedent.
Nearly 50 members of Congress and a number of rights advocacy groups, including influential groups like Amnesty International, have sent letters to Ashcroft urging him to not set rules that would reject gender-based asylum claims.
"We are deeply concerned that the new regulations will reverse current policy and make it more difficult for anyone who has been persecuted by ‘non-state actors’ to gain asylum protection," they said in a joint letter.
"Your new proposed regulations will condemn several women and girls to death."
Rights advocates say they still hope their pleas will succeed. "We are hopeful, but we don’t know," said Eleanor Acer of the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights.
Yasmin is unaware of Alvarado’s case and the groups’ challenge to the impending rule change. But she says she is willing to support their cause.
"I don’t know anything about this. I work for 14 hours a day," she says. "But I would be glad to donate some money if they need. After all, they are fighting to save the lives of women like me. That’s good."
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