Should America Give Refuge to Abused Women?
A woman from Honduras, who shall be identified only by her initials, L.C., was granted asylum in an immigration court in Chicago early this year.
She came to the United States with her teenage daughter, fording the Rio Grande in Texas, after the girl had the extremely bad fortune of being a passer-by witness to a noonday massacre on a street near their home. Gunmen from the Mara 18 gang murdered eight people, mostly bus dispatchers, because the bus company was balking at paying a tax to the gang.
Soon the killers came to L.C.’s house, threatening to abduct her daughter for the sex trade and demanding that L.C. pay the gang for her child to be spared.
But that story of fear was not what persuaded the immigration judge that L.C. had met the legal standard for asylum. Rather, it was her account of sixteen years of beatings and sexual assault by her husband. In one of the last episodes before she fled, he had pressed
