http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4542258.html

Feb. 10, 2007, 10:28PM
Guatemalans find asylum denied years after arriving here
U.S. says the exiles no longer qualify, because that civil war ended in 1996


By TAL ABBADY
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel


• The law: In 1997, the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act allowed Guatemalans who applied for asylum in the 1980s to seek legal residency but not those who fled during the last years of the war.
• The challenge: Advocates argue that, because the U.S. government had a role in the civil war, all asylum seekers from that era should be allowed to stay here.
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. - Juana Tomas resolved to forget the ghosts of San Miguel Acatan.

She fled her native Guatemalan village, tucked in the rural highlands where civil war raged, and headed north in 1991.

In the United States, Tomas sought political asylum. She was 17.

Adolescence turned into adulthood. She gave birth to two sons and made a home for them in Lake Worth, Fla., joining a large, Qanjobal-speaking community of Maya farm workers and day laborers in Palm Beach County.

Raising her children and working in a nursery, she waited for a response from the government.

Fifteen years later, in 2006, Tomas, now 33, learned that federal authorities denied her asylum claim.

An immigration judge recently ordered her deported to Guatemala, a country still reeling from the effects of a war that ended a decade ago.

Advocates say she is one of roughly 250,000 Guatemalans whose asylum claims from the 1990s have been rejected by U.S. authorities. All could be deported.

U.S. officials say Guatemalans no longer qualify for political asylum, because their country's civil war ended in 1996.

Because of a massive backlog, the government only last year began notifying applicants that they must leave the country, immigration lawyers say.

Every year, Tomas renewed her work permit, raised her sons, and had little idea that her newfangled American life was built on borrowed time.

"The memories are less now. But I can't go back. We have a life here," said Tomas in a dimly lighted apartment she shares with U.S.-born sons, Alex, 14, and Jesus, 11, and another family. Now Tomas finds herself challenging the government whose protection she sought.

She and other exiles in Florida, home to 28,650 Guatemalans, plan to join a California lawsuit against the Justice Department, said her attorney, Aileen Josephs.

Attorneys for the nonprofit group Casa de Cultura de Guatemala in Los Angeles are preparing a lawsuit demanding a halt to pending deportations of Guatemalans who entered the United States before the end of the civil war.