Immigration: Courts, and Where Women Will Likely Be Murdered

       Prior to the latest ongoing assault on legal immigration, the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered immigration judges to look hard at every asylum request from a special class of potential immigrant as to whether claims for immediate political asylum have merit.

     The special class of applicant is women.

     This broke wholly necessary, new ground.

     All women, all women from Central America–and the geography may well expand —  may be considered potentially eligible for our protection because of overwhelming evidence that regardless of a woman’s politics (and often without regard for her social class), her life is in imminent danger. 

                                                                                                       Because she’s a woman. 

      Reasons for the ruling include:

          a) consistent and increasing evidence of widespread domestic abuse;

          b) very high and increasing rates of indiscriminate violence against women, including murder and attempted murder rates.

     U.S. Immigration Courts already look hard at claims by young women who fear ritual genital cutting. This new ruling goes further.

      Of course, you could argue that we’re not here to protect women from brutal foreign cultures/regimes.

     If you do, if you know people who do, know, too, that you’re almost certainly aligning yourselves with the kinds of Americans who, in previous generations, would have shut out your grand- and great grandparents if they suffered consistently foul and/or potentially lethal treatment in Western or Central or Southern Europe, Northern, Western, Southern, or South East Asia, South or Central America, and the Near East, or Africa.

     You would be in decidedly shabby company, that horrid lot including the current president.