Last year, a twenty-year-old Mexican crimonology college student made international headlines when she took over as police chief for a township in the border state of Chihuahua — one of Mexico’s most dangerous regions. Marisol Valles Garcia was the only person willing to accept the position after the town’s former police chief was gunned down and beheaded. “We’re all afraid in Mexico now. We can’t let fear beat us,” she said after being sworn in last October.

Yet, after just a few months on the job, newspapers are reporting that Valles Garcia was fired yesterday for “abandoning her post.” The young police chief was reportedly on leave to be with her child until Monday. However, she never returned. Although town officials are denying reports that Valles Garcia actually fled her post, her relatives have provided a different story. According to loved ones, Valles Garcia is in the U.S. seeking asylum after receiving multiple death threats from drug cartels. The AFP reports:

A college student and mother who was a Mexican bordertown police chief has fled to the United States seeking asylum, one of her relatives told AFP on Thursday. Marisol Valles, 20, “received death threats from a criminal group that wanted to force her to work for them,” the relative told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Valles, who has a baby son, took over the job as police chief in the town of Praxedis G. Guerrero in October after two other job candidates dropped out following the assassination of the mayor and his son.
Valles “went to the United States along with two relatives and will seek asylum,” the source told AFP.

Today, an official with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) told AFP that Valles Garcia is in fact in the United States.

The former police chief joins a growing group of Mexican and Central American nationals who have fled rampant drug violence in search of political asylum. The number of people asking for asylum at ports of entry just along the U.S. – Mexico border has nearly doubled over the past couple of years. Yet, obtaining asylum remains difficult. In order to qualify, asylum applicants must prove “credible fear” based on their membership in a social, political, religious, or ethnic group that has been targeted for persecution. Asylum applicants who are fleeing Latin America’s drug violence usually have no problem demonstrating that they have a reason to fear for their lives, however, persecution based on their membership in a group is much more difficult to prove. Less than two percent of the 3,800 Mexican asylum petitions were approved last year.

At least one Latin American asylum seeker who fled drug violence has been successful as the courts start to grapple with the modern day threats that many of our southern neighbors are facing. Last year, a journalist who received death threats after covering the drug war in Mexico was granted asylum in the U.S. It was deemed one of the first cases of its kind. Yet, a Texas court recently denied the asylum petition from a police officer from Juarez, Mexico on the basis that he simply faced “the risks police officers have to take.” (The asylum seeker in question, José Alarcón, claims he was being set up by his own bosses to be killed — which doesn’t seem like a risk any law enforcement officer should have to take in my opinion).

Based on precedent, Valles Garcia will likely face an uphill legal battle to stay in the U.S. At the very least though, the attention she has already attracted will most likely shed more light on a set of asylum standards that one Judge has referred to as “illogical” and “perverse.”

A while back, an immigration judge denied asylum to a young Serbian gay man, Mladen Todorovic, who claimed to have suffered persecution by government officials and others in his native country because of his sexual orientation. The judge justified the ruling by reasoning that Todorovic “does not appear to be overtly gay”:

The Court studied the demeanor of this individual very carefully throughout his testimony in Court today, and this gentleman does not appear to be overtly gay. The Court does not know whether he is or not, his testimony is that he is overtly gay and has been since he was 17 years old. Be that as it may, it is not readily apparent to a person who would see this gentleman for the first time that, that is the case, since he bears no effeminate traits or any other trait that would mark him as a homosexual.

The Asylumist blog reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled last week that the judge in question “improperly relied on gay stereotypes to reach an adverse credibility determination.” In fact, “the decision was so colored by impermissible stereotyping of homosexuals, under the guise of a determination on ‘demeanor,’” that the appeals court could not conduct a “meaningful” review of the judge’s decision and instead ordered immigration authorities to hold a new factual hearing on Todorovic’s case.

The appeals judge additionally highlighted the longstanding principle that an applicant may establish eligibility for asylum by showing that his or her “life or freedom would be threatened in the proposed country of removal on account of …membership in a particular social group.” If Todorovic’s testimony is accurate, he certainly has a compelling case. Courthouse News reports:

Todorovic claimed that he had been repeatedly harassed by his high-school classmates, raped by soldiers and at least one commanding officer in the Serbian army, and beaten unconscious by an anti-gay mob.

He said Serbian police stopped him and his boyfriend, a gay-rights activist, and took them to the police station, where they forced Todorovic to perform oral sex on the “filthiest” inmate, saying they “brought a hooker up here so you can have some fun.”

An officer then interrogated and beat Todorovic, saying he “hates fucking faggots” and hopes they all get “exterminated,” according to Todorovic. Todorovic joined the crew of a cruise ship and sailed to Miami in November 2000, where he lived for two years before filing for U.S. asylum and withholding of removal.

Todorovic isn’t the the first person to be denied asylum simply on the basis of not seeming “gay enough.” In 2002, Jorge Soto Vega of Mexico was initially denied asylum on the grounds that he did not “look gay.” The decision was ultimately overturned.

Yesterday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals instructed immigration officials to consider recognizing young Guatemalan women as a “particular social group” for asylum purposes. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) an individual qualifies for asylum only if that person meets the legal definition of a refugee. Traditionally, asylum petitions from Latin Americans have been dismissed outright as “fraudulent or frivolous.” Refugees are often viewed as people “fleeing oppressive political regimes or have been members of religious or ethnic minorities facing persecution.” However, as violence soars in Mexico and parts of Central America, judges are faced with a growing need to take asylum claims from Latin America much more seriously than they did before.

An immigration judge initially denied Guatemalan immigrant Yajayra Perdomo asylum, arguing that women between the ages of 14 and 40 should not be recognized as a “particular social group.” The Board of Immigration Appeals agreed. However, the 9th Circuit repealed the decision, calling the board’s ruling “inconsistent with its own precedent and this court’s case law.” “[W]e clearly acknowledged that women in a particular country, regardless of ethnicity or clan membership, could form a particular social group,” Judge Richard Paez wrote. The 9th Circuit left it up to the Board to issue a decision whether Perdomo qualifies for asylum.

The court also ruled that fear of “femicide” constitutes a valid asylum claim. Since the year 2000, more than 3,800 women and girls (mostly from ages 13 to 36) have been murdered in Guatemala. The Hastings College of Law has noted in the past that “Guatemala’s legal system is rife with provisions that minimize the seriousness of violence against women.” Amnesty International writes that “investigations into crimes against women, including transgender women, are often inadequate and obstructed by investigating police who act with a gender bias.”

Watch a report by Al Jazeera on femicide in Guatemala:

While females are often killed “simply because of their gender,” violence cuts across gender lines in Guatemala and other neighboring countries. The United Nations Development Program found that “Central America is the most violent region of the world, with the exception of those regions where some countries are at war or are experiencing severe political violence.” More than 5,600 murders were registered in Guatemala in 2009. Ninety-eight percent of those murders went unpunished. El Salvador ended 2009 with a “historic number” of 4,365 homicides. Honduras is said to have the highest murder rate: 66.8 for every 100,000 inhabitants. Mexico, which is significantly larger and more populous than three other Central American countries has a homicide rate of 12 per 100,000.

In August 2009, A DHS spokesman told the Wall Street Journal that the government is “developing regulations to better define grounds for asylum.” In 2009, the government reopened the monumental case of a Salvadoran family who argue that the Court should consider resistance to joining gangs as grounds for asylum. However, not everyone is so lucky. Last month, the New York Times reported that Benito Zaldívar, a Salvadoran immigrant who was deported back to El Salvador after a court denied his asylum petition was shot in the face as “revenge” for speaking against the gang. “I’ve done about a hundred cases of Salvadoran males who refused to join gangs,” said Roy Petty, Zaldívar’s lawyer. “I have to tell them you are probably going to lose. The immigration system did not believe these people were really in danger.”

In Washington, there’s little appetite amongst politicians to deal with the “illogical” and “perverse” legal hurdles of the U.S. asylum system. In March, Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT) boldly sponsored the Refugee Protection Act which “addresses shortfalls in current law that place unnecessary and harmful barriers before refugees with legitimate asylum claims.” The bill is currently stalled in Congress.