[Cinci-nfb] FW: Deaf Mexican immigrants are declaring asylum in the U.S.—and winning {"credible fear of persecution"}

[Marianne Denning]

It is so terrible that this is happening to people with disabilities
all around the world.  Paul and I have certainly learned this by
hosting blind exchange students.  When we send them back home I am
sick because I know their potential and what they are returning to.
My hope is that I have prepared them, in some small way, to change
things in their countries.

On 9/29/15, Deborah Kendrick via Cinci-nfb <cinci-nfb at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> This story is about a woman who is deaf, not blind, but it is one that
> should touch us all.
>
> Long, but worth reading.
>
> We have a long way to go, many battles yet to win, but his can serve as a
> reminder that we have much for which to be grateful as well.
>
> Peace,
>
> Deborah
>
>
>
> Subject: Deaf Mexican immigrants are declaring asylum in the U.S.—and
> winning {"credible fear of persecution"}
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Deaf Mexican immigrants are declaring asylum in the U.S.—and winning
> {"credible fear of persecution"}
>
> http://fusion.net/story/205119/deaf-mexican-immigrants-declaring-asylum-us/
>
> Casey Tolan | September 28, 2015 4:53 p.m.
>
> When Rosa Aranda was 15 years old, a teacher wrote her name on a
> chalkboard: R-O-S-A. “These letters,” the teacher told her, “this is
> your name.”
>
> At first, Aranda was confused. Growing up deaf in a small Mexican town
> where there was no education system for kids like her, she had never
> learned how to read, write, or do sign language. Unable to communicate,
> Aranda had been beaten and mistreated by her family while her siblings
> went to school.
>
> “No one had ever told me what my name was,” Aranda said through a sign
> language interpreter. “I was 15, and it was my first time reading my name.”
>
> Now, Aranda, 58, is an undocumented immigrant living in San Diego. She’s
> one of hundreds of deaf immigrants from Mexico and other countries who
> have applied for asylum in the U.S. in the past few years. They argue
> that the treatment they received in their home countries—which also
> include Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Colombia—amounts to
> persecution, and that deaf people living there today are still being
> discriminated against.
>
> It’s a novel reasoning, legal experts say, but it appears to be working.
> Of the 250 deaf immigrants that California attorney Hadley Bajramovic
> has helped apply for asylum since 2010, four have won their case and
> none have been rejected. A fifth is pending final approval. (Cases
> generally stretch on for five years or even longer.) Since they’ve
> started winning, attorneys from around the country have been calling
> Bajramovic asking for help with their own deaf clients.
>
> Applying for asylum isn’t the same as becoming a refugee—people who
> declare asylum are already in the U.S., either illegally or on a
> temporary visa. If they’re approved, they’re on the path to a green card
> and permanent residency. In order to be approved for asylum, they have
> to prove to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that they have a
> credible fear of persecution in their home country because of their
> race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or a membership in a
> particular social group.
>
> The deaf immigrants fall into that last category. Stephen Yale-Loehr, a
> Cornell law school professor who studies asylum and isn’t associated
> with these cases, said applying for asylum because of deafness was a
> unique and “creative interpretation” of the law.
>
> But just being deaf isn’t enough to get asylum. Applicants have to show
> proof that they would be persecuted if the U.S. government deports them
> back to Mexico. Lots of corroborating evidence and grueling interviews
> are required. Historically, people applying for asylum have a less than
> 50% win rate, Yale-Loehr said, so the success of the deaf immigrants so
> far is striking.
>
> “It’s sort of like granting asylum to gay and lesbians and other
> persecuted minorities,” Yale-Loehr said. “The mere fact that these
> people have gone through the asylum gauntlet successfully means that
> they were able to prove that they have a real fear of persecution.”
>
> Aranda, whose case is still pending, has lived in the U.S. for almost
> two decades and raised her family here. She now signs in a mix of
> American and Mexican sign language, but the fact that she only started
> learning any language at age 15 has made it hard for her to become
> fluent in either. In a video interview, she signed to her son Ian
> Guzman, who is also deaf and translated into American sign language.
> Kathy Veylit, another interpreter, translated into spoken English for
> me. It’s a slow, complicated process, with a lot of back-and-forth,
> checking, and verifying.
>
> {Sidebar} Rosa Aranda, her son Ian Guzman, and her grandson do a video
> interview with me and sign language interpreter Kathy Veylit.
>
> But Aranda said she wanted to tell her life story because it might get
> more attention on the treatment of deaf people in Mexico. “What I went
> through—not having language, not being able to communicate—other people
> are going through that now,” she said.
>
> ‘I felt like I was trapped’
>
> Aranda was born in Tehuixtla, a tiny town in the central Mexican state
> of Morelos. She grew up in a family where everyone could hear normally
> except for one older deaf sister. Her parents didn’t seem to understand
> her problem.
>
> Every day, Aranda would walk to school with her other siblings, and then
> stand in front of the building as they went inside. The door would
> close, and she’d go back home. “I thought I was going to have notebooks,
> pens, be able to go to school like all the other children,” she said.
> She would point to the school, try to make her father understand what
> she wanted, but he just laughed.
>
> “I would cry every day. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t go to
> school, and I couldn’t communicate that,” she said. “I was very
> frustrated.”
> Related
>
> Aranda’s mother died when she was six, and three weeks later, her father
> remarried the family maid. Her new stepmother forced Aranda and her deaf
> sister to clean the house, do the cooking, and wash all the clothes by
> hand. “We didn’t feel like part of the family,” Aranda said.
>
> When she was 11, Aranda says, she was molested by a neighbor, a woman
> who would kiss her and touch her inappropriately. “I was confused
> whether what she was doing was wrong or right,” she said.
>
> Whenever she tried to communicate, by gesturing or miming, her family
> would laugh, and make the one gesture she came to know too well—spinning
> their finger around their ear: loco, crazy. Sometimes, her father would
> beat her and she didn’t know why.
>
> Aranda’s experience is not uncommon. There was no right to sign language
> education for deaf children in Mexico until 2005, and even now there’s a
> shortage of sign language teachers. For decades, being deaf was seen as
> a mental incompetence, and deaf people were not allowed to drive or buy
> homes. Many still get by by begging or working lower-than-minimum-wage
> jobs.
>
> Many Mexican deaf kids like Aranda, who are born to a rural family
> without deaf relatives, don’t get any kind of language education until a
> late age. That can have a severe impact on their cognitive development
> for the rest of their lives, said Rachel Mayberry, a linguist at UC-San
> Diego who has studied language use among deaf people.
>
> “A lot of people think that sign language is something that deaf people
> can just do,” Mayberry said. “It’s not different from other language—if
> nobody uses sign language with you, then you don’t have the opportunity
> to learn it.”
>
> The result is a little like being alone in a foreign country where you
> don’t read or speak the language—except that you don’t have your own
> country to go home to.
>
> “I felt like I was trapped,” Aranda said.
>
> That changed when she was 15, when an aunt brought her and her sister to
> a church in Mexico City that ran a school for deaf people. “We went in
> the church, and saw all these deaf people, and they were signing,”
> Aranda said.
>
> The first thing she learned was her name. Her aunt had brought her birth
> certificate, and the teacher spelled it out on the board: R-O-S-A.
>
> “When I learned that, I was motivated to learn more words,” Aranda
> said. “I wanted to learn more about the world.” She started taking
> classes in sign language and reading and writing.
>
> One teacher in particular took the time to teach her everything—an
> incredibly difficult process, starting as a teenager what most kids
> learn when they’re three or four years old. “This woman changed my life,
> she gave me life,” Aranda said, tears in her eyes. “She told me, you
> have to learn, you can do this. She didn’t give up on me.”
>
> Crossing over
>
> Aranda married a deaf man when she was 21. Their three kids—one daughter
> and two twin sons—were all born deaf (deafness is a recessive trait that
> can be passed genetically). Her husband was abusive, and they fought
> often. She ended up divorcing him and taking her kids to Tijuana, where
> she worked for the government as a data clerk.
>
> The city still lacked real education for the deaf. “I started thinking
> I didn’t want my three deaf children going through the same experience I
> had had growing up—no education, no schooling, no life,” Aranda said.
>
> She heard from other deaf friends about a place called America, not too
> far away, where there were great schools. With help from her co-workers,
> she got a passport and a U.S. tourist visa, and assumed that she could
> just continue her job after moving.
>
> But when she and her kids crossed over the border, she quickly realized
> she needed things she could hardly understand: a social security number,
> a work permit, a green card. So she started working as a peddler,
> selling bracelets and other trinkets in public places, making just
> enough money to support her family. They lived in a cramped house in
> Chula Vista, a suburb of San Diego that’s only a few miles north of
> Tijuana.
>
> Aranda crossed over in 1996, just before Bill Clinton signed a
> far-reaching anti-illegal immigration bill that stepped up border
> controls and deportations. “People told me to be quiet and not get in
> trouble, and I didn’t know why I was supposed to be hushed about it,”
> she said. “I wanted a better education for my children, so I didn’t
> think about the laws or things like that.”
>
> She added, laughing, “Now I know all about that.”
>
> For 18 years, I had been terrified and hiding around… Now I feel like a
> normal person and I can have a normal life here.
> - Rosa Aranda
>
> According to asylum rules, immigrants who want to declare asylum must do
> so while they’re still covered by a student or tourist visa or within a
> year of their visa expiring. The process is more complicated for people
> like Aranda who illegally overstayed their visa. To get around this,
> Bajramovic, the lawyer, is arguing that the lack of education for many
> of her deaf clients made it impossible for them to understand the rules.
>
> “Most of them had no idea what a country is,” Bajramovic said. “Most had
> no understanding of borders. They only knew that one place had trash on
> the street and the other didn’t.”
>
> That’s not to say that these people aren’t mentally capable, she
> says, but “it’s a part of the persecution that happens when a country
> does not make sure that their deaf people are provided with education.”
>
> Some deaf immigrants have even worse stories than Aranda’s. Groups of
> deaf Mexicans were trafficked to the U.S. in the ‘90s by gangs. They
> were held in virtual slavery in cramped houses in New York and
> California, and forced to beg on the subway and streets.
>
> In the two decades since she crossed the border, Aranda has built a life
> and a family in the U.S. She moved across the state several times,
> saving money to send her kids to the best schools for the deaf. She’s
> survived breast cancer twice.
>
> But she always knew she was one wrong move away from being deported back
> to her old life.
>
> Out of the shadows
>
> When a friend introduced Aranda and her family to Bajramovic five years
> ago, they were struggling to get by. Her kids, who couldn’t afford
> college and couldn’t work legally, were screen-printing T-shirts to make
> money.
>
> Aranda agreed to become one of Bajramovic’s clients and applied for
> asylum. Her case, like many others, stretches on today. After applying,
> she and others who are waiting for asylum approval receive work
> authorization after half a year.
>
> “Once I got that, I felt that I was safe, that I could go places without
> being frightened of the police,” she said. “For 18 years, I had been
> terrified and hiding around, driving without a proper license because
> the laws forbid me to have one. Now I feel like a normal person and I
> can have a normal life here.”
>
> Hadley Bajramovic, the attorney representing hundreds of deaf immigrants
> in their asylum cases.
>
> Bajramovic says that once clients declare asylum and get a working
> permit, it’s a sea change from past lives “living in the shadows,
> completely cut off, sometimes exploited or trafficked or used by
> employers, paid like fifty cents an hour.” Many get jobs at supermarket
> chains or places like Goodwill, earning their first legal wages.
>
> Aranda’s children have also been eligible for Obama’s Deferred Action
> for Childhood Arrivals policy. Ian, her son who’s a translator, works
> with the deaf Mexican community and is fluent in American and Mexican
> sign language. His sister also works in translation, and his twin
> brother is a visual designer studying at UCLA. The opportunity to go to
> school and work openly have changed the lives of his whole family, he says.
>
> “I’ve seen what my mom went through here in America,” he said. “Other
> deaf people have no community, no support. I want to give back.”
>
> Aranda’s older, deaf sister is still living in Mexico, and the two have
> fallen out of touch. If her asylum is approved and she gets a green
> card, Aranda said she hopes she can eventually help her sister come to
> the U.S. and have a better life.
>
> In the meantime, Aranda has to wait. Asylum offices around the country
> are backed up, in part due to the huge influx of Central American women
> and children who came into the U.S. last summer and declared asylum. The
> Los Angeles asylum office, where many of Bajramovic’s clients are
> applying, has wait times of more than four years between an application
> and an interview.
>
> Deaf applicants face their own logistical challenges because the asylum
> office needs to hire trained interpreters, and often secondary
> interpreters like Ian, who translate between different forms of sign
> language.
>
> A spokesperson for the U.S. citizenship and immigration services
> declined to comment on the deaf immigrant cases.
>
> Undocumented applicants can be deported if their asylum claims are
> rejected, but that hasn’t happened in any of the 250 cases so far. New
> rules put in place by the Obama administration prioritize resources to
> deport undocumented immigrants with significant criminal convictions.
> Almost all of the deaf immigrants that Bajramovic has helped apply have
> no criminal record, she said.
>
> Aranda says that while she worries about whether her asylum case is
> approved, she’s focused on her family and spending time with her five
> grandkids. None of them are deaf, but they’re all learning sign
> language. While Aranda had no way to communicate when she was growing
> up, they have many: English, Spanish, signing.
>
> She hopes more deaf people facing what she faced have the opportunity to
> come to the U.S. “A lot of deaf people have a lot of potential and are
> very intelligent, but they have no ability to communicate, they don’t
> have any ways to express themselves,” Aranda said. “That prevents them
> from becoming the successful people they can become.”
>
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>
> __
>
>


-- 
Marianne Denning, TVI, MA
Teacher of students who are blind or visually impaired
(513) 607-6053