The New York Times reported last Wednesday that the Obama administration will support granting asylum for at least some victims of severe domestic violence. This new position, written in a court filing submitted by the government in a currently pending asylum case, reverses the previous Bush administration stance.
Just why the Bush administration opposed granting asylum in this case is a mystery. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security had indicated in the asylum case of a Guatemalan woman named Rodi Alvarado that they would be open to granting battered women asylum in limited circumstances, but as the Times article notes, the administration never pushed the position forward. Indeed:
“As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued…that battered women could not meet the strict standards of American asylum law.”
The reason most often cited for opposing gender-based asylum claims like this, is that allowing battered women to apply for asylum would lead to an overwhelming flood of applications from women all over the world. But this hasn’t been the experience of other countries which allow domestic violence to be grounds for asylum. Take Canada, for instance. Two years after they put into place guidelines on accepting gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum (including domestic violence), these types of cases made up less than 2% of the 40,000 refugee claims.<sup>1</sup> Because our asylum systems are similarly structured, it’s likely that we’ll have a comparably small number of applicants.
Moreover, the requirements for gaining asylum as battered women under this new rubric are extremely stringent:
“In addition to meeting the existing strict conditions for being granted asylum, abused women need to show a judge that women are viewed as subordinate by their abuser, according to a court filing by the administration, and must also show that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country.”
Adopting guidelines like the ones above will make it more likely for us to recognize gender-based asylum claims among women who already come here, but likely will not encourage more women to flee here in the first place. Unfortunately, most women just don’t have the resources or support systems to leave their batterers or their countries in the first place.
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1. Hannah R. Shapiro, The Future of Spousal Abuse as a Gender-Based Asylum Claim: The Implications of the Recent Case of Matter of R A , 14 Temp. Int’l & Comp. L.J. 463, 486 (2000).
Read more at The Opportunity Agenda website.