Reporter Seeking Asylum Could Soon Learn His Fate
Thursday, January 20, 2011
by Julian Aguilar
The Texas Tribune

Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez has done what’s been asked of him. He’s stayed out of trouble, and he’s put the seven months he spent in an American detention center behind him. Now he just wants to know if he will be allowed to remain in the United States or whether he will be returned to Mexico, where he believes his life is in danger.

On Friday, he may get his answer when he appears before an immigration judge in El Paso. Gutiérrez has been seeking asylum since June 2008, when he fled the small Chihuahua town of Ascensión after receiving death threats for his reporting on alleged corruption in the Mexican military. So clear and present was the threat, Gutiérrez says, that he and his 15-year-old son had only minutes to pack before heading to the U.S. port of entry at Antelope Wells, N.M., in the middle of the night.

Once at the border, Gutiérrez told U.S. authorities that he was in danger and needed asylum. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents admitted Gutiérrez into the country — and immediately placed him in a locked and guarded detention center. There he sat for seven months, until January 2009, when he was released as a parolee. His son was held in a separate detention center for juveniles and released after two months.

Gutiérrez was detained because he didn’t have a legal way to enter the U.S. when he arrived at the border late that night. When another Mexican journalist, Alejandro Hernández Pacheco, asked U.S. authorities for asylum last summer, after he was kidnapped in Mexico, he was told he would be granted a meeting with an asylum officer — not a judge. And then he went home to his temporary residence in El Paso, where he has waited with his family ever since. He was never detained. Unlike Gutiérrez, Hernández first entered the U.S. legally, on a 30-day work visa.

Two journalists — both apparently facing imminent danger — two very different routes to pursuing asylum in the U.S. Advocates for foreigners seeking asylum because they face danger either at the hands of the government or drug gangs or both say it is unfair to penalize those who do not have the luxury of time to plan an orderly way into the United States.

U.S. officials say they cannot compromise the nation’s security, particularly in a post-9/11 world. They cite at least two cases in which someone who had applied for asylum later committed acts of terrorism against the U.S. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security rejected a petition submitted by the National Immigration Justice Center, an immigrant rights advocacy group, and a coalition of more than 30 organizations asking the agency not to detain “arriving aliens who are found to have a credible fear of persecution or tortureâ€