"Sorry, but you did not need that much therapy..."

…a momentary digression from discussing comprehensive immigration reform and the facts are as follows: a woman is sold by her father to another man in a business exchange, forcibly raped by that man on numerous occasions and then used by that man to pose as his “wife” so that he could gain admission to the United States. This man forces the woman to come to this country so he can seek additional financial backing for a business overseas and he forces her, in the process, to leave her only child, a daughter who is under age 5, behind with a family member. This woman knows only too well that society in her home country mandates that her daughter be subject to female genital mutilation when she turns 7 years of age.

The woman is trapped – she feels intense shame and humiliation and continuously relives in her mind the series of sexual assaults and the car ride to the airport separating mother from daughter. She can’t stop thinking about the horror.

She begins seeing a therapist at a Midwest center for victims of domestic violence and torture to work through recurrent nightmares and persistent sleeping problems associated with her experiences. While under care she begins to come to grips with what happened to her, she starts to understand that is okay to feel bad about having been so heinously victimized; she understands that she is still a good person with something to not only offer society but she has a mother’s knowledge and love to impart to her daughter…the only problem is that mother and daughter are now separated by nearly 5000 miles.

She gathers the courage to not only confide her experiences to others, but she musters the bravery it requires to submit these facts to the United States government and seek its discretionary power to protect her, to keep her from being forcibly-returned now to her home country and her persecutor. She seeks political asylum…so what happens?

A male United States asylum officer finds that while she has established a good reason for seeking asylum when she did she unfortunately did not come to grips with her experiences and did not muster her courage (even though she was undergoing continual therapy including prescription medication for her recurring bouts of anxiety and fear about what has happened to her) in a timely enough fashion.

Go tell your story in another forum – to an immigration judge, a government prosecutor, and a court interpreter – and see if the judge will let you stay.

The unthinkable (but cynically almost-expected) happens – the “delay” caused by undergoing and completing intense therapy for such a terrible, but acceptable in her home country, series of domestic violence is what makes her ineligible to seek asylum in the United States. You have to do so within one year of admission to our country (in fact, some in our country would want this period limited even further). She did not, so the US government wants to deport her and send her back to the country where she has endured so much physical and mental anguish. My fear is that the government feels it is doing her a favor by re-uniting her with her daughter…her fight against banishment from the United States continues.