A Legislative Rejoinder to "Give Me Your Gays, Your Lesbians, and Your victims of Gender Violence, Yearning To Breathe Free of Sexual Persecution
February 19th, 2009 by Leonard Birdsong
Gender Violence: The In R-A- Aylum Case Saga
September 14th, 2008 by Leonard Birdsong
Students in Birdsong’s Refugee Law seminar and others should know of the now ‘infamous” aylum case concerning abused women. It is the case of In R-A-, a case of gender violence wherein the victim sought asylum in 1995. The case, after many reversals and proposed INS regulations is yet to have been resolved. This excerpt is from a Birdsong article pusblished in the Nova Law Reveiw which appeared in the Spring of 2008:
Iin 1995 came the gender violence case that continues to cause controversy with respect to how we apply asylum law to women who are subjected to extreme domestic abuse. In In re R-A- a Guatemalan woman, Rodi Alvarado Pena, sought asylum in the United States. She had fled her country to escape a husband who, for at least ten years, had abused her, beaten her, broken a window and a mirror with her head, kicked her in her vagina when she was pregnant, raped and sodomized her, and had threatened to kill her if she ever left him. The police would not help her. The IJ found her testimony credible and granted asylum
Immigration Law Trends — Asylum For Gay Persons 2
June 23rd, 2008 by Leonard Birdsong
When the United States of America came into being with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, there were no immigration laws. There were no such laws for almost 100 years. In 1875 the first immigration law was passed by Congress and Americans have been debating who should be allowed to legally immigrate to the United States and who should be excluded.
The Immigration Act of 1917 was the first U.S. law to exclude lesbian and gay aliens from entry into the United States. Congress excluded lesbians and gay men because of the medical and psychiatric communities’ belief that homosexuality was a disease. Congress ended the general exclusion of lesbian and gay aliens in 1990, which has allowed refugees to escape sexual orientation based persecution in their home countries. Also in 1990, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) affirmed an immigration judge’s (IJ’s) decision to withhold deportation of a gay Cuban marielito in the case of In re Toboso-Alfonso. This was the first known instance in U.S. immigration law where a homosexual was cast as a member of a particular social group,
