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Goodman: The U.S. Should Provide Asylum To Refugees

Peter Goodman

Commentary: We always say Nazis and East German Communists should have said “No!” to commands from the armies of their dictatorships. But how do we treat someone who has sufficient conviction and guts to say “No!” to a dictator we abhor?

Venezuela descended into a crazy dictatorship. We've imposed sanctions; The OAS accuses the Maduro regime of “crimes against humanity,” and the International Criminal Court is investigating human rights abuses. The U.S. calls the dictatorship “a failed state,” and our Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, is talking about “regime change.”

 

So imagine you're Helegner Ramón Tijera Moreno, a Venezuelan soldier. You agree that the Maduro regime is beyond the pale, a dictatorship destroying its people. You try to resign from the army. The response is physical and psychological abuse. Finally you flee to the U.S., a bastion of freedom and a strong opponent of the evil you're resisting. You don't sneak in. You present yourself to Border Patrol at a port-of-entry in El Paso. It's September 2016. You figure you'll get a fair hearing, maybe get asylum, and at worst get help relocating elsewhere.

 

Good luck! 

 

You don't know that the rate of denials of asylum cases in El Paso (95%) is one of the nation's highest. 

 

You don't expect your U.S. ally to keep you in prison. At your hearing, you don't expect the hearing judge and the prosecutor to tell you to go back to Venezuela, face desertion charges, and be tortured. (Under a new law, they could jail you 10-20 years just for your political opinions.) The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the OAS human rights arm have issued resolutions saying no one should be involuntarily repatriated to Venezuela.

 

You appeal. Even so, ICE takes you to an airport and attempts to deport you. You tell them you want a lawyer. ICE says “no te queremos acá” [“We don't want you here!”] and stops short of deporting you only because your lawyer provides proof of your pending appeal.

 

Helegner remains in jail, with no release imminent, and may even be deported despite his pending appeal. I have no basis for saying how that appeal should come out; but under our laws and traditions, Helegner deserves to be heard.

 

Why are we treating this man so badly, when his only mistake was to resist a dictatorship we say he should resist and to believe that our rhetoric might have some meaning?

 

It makes no sense. The law and simple humanitarian values would suggest treating him better and at least trying to help resettle him elsewhere if his asylum appeal is denied. Our treaties regarding refugees may legally require us to treat him better than we have. Logically, he doesn't deserve to be in jail, since he did not even enter the country illegally. Add to that the fact that our government purports to be against the Maduro regime, and has even said it won't recognize the results of a recent sham election, and we should want to encourage Venezuelans who agree with us.

 

ICE won't tell me what it's thinking. But one quick guess is that the ethos within ICE (to which Mr. Trump's regime is one contributing factor) is so mindlessly, almost viciously anti-immigrant that no one stops to make a reasoned decision, let alone a wrongly reasoned one. So a guy rots in jail for doing what we think is right.

 

Please, guys, not in our name!