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In one beating, the El Salvador woman told the immigration judge, her boyfriend’s beatings disfigured her jaw and knocked out two of her front teeth. After raping her, he forced her to tattoo his name in ragged letters on her back, bragging that he was marking her with his mark.
The judge seemed moved by her testimony. At the September hearing in Baltimore immigration court, he found that the woman’s terror of returning to her country, where she said the boyfriend was lurking, was credible. But he was quick to deny his asylum claim, saying the danger he faced did not fit any definition of persecution under current interpretations of US law.
The outcome for the woman, identified in her confidential asylum case as LM, was the result of a 2018 decision by President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Setting aside two decades of precedent, Sessions ruled that domestic violence and most gang violence cannot be the basis for asylum.
As President-elect Joe Biden deliberately moves toward the transition to the White House, even as Trump refuses to accept defeat, he has set a fast-track agenda to undo Trump’s tough immigration policies. But even if Biden swiftly orders a final end to family separations and reopens the border for asylum seekers, his plans could stall without action in the justice department, which has broad power over the immigration system.
To carry out Biden’s proposals, his attorney general will have to reverse decisions by Sessions and Attorney General William Barr that drastically limited asylum, especially for people like LM fleeing Central America. Biden’s justice officials will have to deal with an immigration appeals court charged by Barr with conservative judges known for denying asylum.
