Doctor's Immigration Ills

Eight months pregnant, Minya left their young daughter with Ghebrai and flew to the United States from Asmara, a capital slightly smaller than the District.

He followed in 1996 after receiving an opportunity to train at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Los Angeles. He was a senior doctor in Asmara's biggest hospital, which had swelled to 800 beds during the years of fighting between Eritrean rebels and Ethiopian troops. But his position offered little safety. Officers came around to press him about his wife's whereabouts. He sent their daughter to relatives in Kenya.

They have yet to be reunited.

"Why don't you bring her here?" wonders the couple's 5-year-old son, who, like his 13-year-old brother, was born in the United States.

Minya filed for sanctuary several months after her visa expired. The claim for her and her husband rested on her history in the Eritrean Liberation Front, a revolutionary group that fought for independence from Ethiopia but these days is one of many organizations targeted by Eritrea's leaders. U.S. law specifies that asylum can be granted for past persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution based on political affiliation.

The law also addresses religious beliefs. Although the evangelical church where the couple worships would be banned in Eritrea -- U.S. officials and international human rights groups have accused its rulers of using violence to repress religion -- no lawyer raised faith as an issue.

"You can get arrested for being at a prayer meeting," said Dan Connell, an expert on Eritrea who lectures on journalism and African politics at Simmons College in Massachusetts. The dates Minya cites for her detention and abuse are "absolutely credible," falling within a decade of terror and secret jails, he said. Many citizens still live in fear, he added. "This is a consolidated dictatorship."

The application wended its way through a multi-stage system of both administrative and judicial review. Jan Pederson, the attorney now representing the couple, describes their decade-long legal journey as "a chain of multiple failures."

The first immigration judge they encountered held multiple hearings and then was put on leave because of a derisive quip to a Ugandan woman in another case. His replacement decided that the couple needed to retell their stories and then seized on inconsistencies in Minya's testimony, particularly the number of times she said she had been raped in prison. Unless she was lying, he concluded, that was something she would never confuse or forget. The day he denied her and her husband asylum, he punched "Play" on a tape recorder and let it announce his ruling as he exited the courtroom.

Immigration judges have considerable discretion on the issue of credibility. Inconsistencies are not automatically reasons for asylum to be refused. Yet their next attorney, who argued the case before an immigration appeal board, failed to address conflicting details on several key points of their previous testimony. His lapse proved devastating.

The board turned them down. And last fall, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit dismissed their petition without scheduling arguments. A few weeks later, that lawyer was suspended for his incompetent counsel in their case.

The Baltimore office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is in charge of the couple's removal. "It can be very unpopular when someone's been told they do not have the right to live here," acknowledged Dorothy Herrera-Niles, the assistant field office director.