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In a beating, the El Salvador woman told the immigration judge that her boyfriend’s punches disfigured her jaw and broke two of her front teeth. After raping her, he forced her to have his name tattooed in jagged letters on her back, boasting that he marked her with his mark.
The judge seemed moved by his testimony. At the September hearing in Baltimore Immigration Court, he found the woman’s terror of returning to her country, where she said the boyfriend was on the prowl, to be credible. But he quickly rejected her asylum claim, saying the danger she faced did not fit any definition of persecution under current interpretations of US law.
The outcome for the woman, identified in her confidential asylum file as LM, was the result of a 2018 ruling by President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Setting aside two decades of precedent, Sessions ruled that domestic violence and most gang violence could not be the basis for asylum.
As President-elect Joe Biden deliberately undertakes a transition to the White House, even if Trump refuses to accept defeat, he has established a swift agenda to untie Trump’s tough immigration policies. But even if Biden quickly orders a final end to family separations and reopens the border for asylum seekers, his plans could stall without action at the Justice Department, which has extensive power over the immigration system.
To implement Biden’s proposals, his attorney general will have to overturn decisions by Sessions and Attorney General William Barr that severely limited asylum, especially for people like LM fleeing Central America. Biden justice officials will face an immigration appeals court charged by Barr with conservative judges known to have refused asylum.
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