http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5481038.html

Refugee fights again to avoid deportation
Randy Furst, Star Tribune
June 29, 2005 HURTADO0629

Twenty-three years after he entered the United States illegally, Rene Hurtado was back in Immigration Court this week, clashing with a government attorney who is seeking to prove that Hurtado tortured prisoners when he worked for the Treasury Police in El Salvador. It would be grounds for his deportation.

In a Bloomington courtroom jammed with supporters, Hurtado, 47, repeatedly denied that he had engaged in torture, insisting he had spoken out to expose the role of the U.S. government and the CIA in training El Salvador police in torture techniques.

"You have made this your career to go after me," Hurtado told Richard Soli, chief immigration counsel for the region under the Department of Homeland Security, who was cross-examining him. "I do believe in human rights.

Hurtado likened the training in torture to recent allegations of prisoner abuses by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

A member of the Treasury Police from 1976 to 1981, Hurtado fled to the United States, ending up in Minnesota. He was embraced by St. Luke Presbyterian Church in Minnetonka, which gave him sanctuary until he won temporary legal status.

Hurtado, who has used that name to protect his family, has battled immigration authorities to a standstill several times. In 1999, a judge found that authorities had not proved that he committed atrocities. He was granted "suspension of deportation" status. Now he's back to deportation status.

He became a cause celebre among peace activists and still draws a crowd. Of the 30 seats in the courtroom on Monday and Tuesday, almost all were filled with supporters, many from his church, and another 20 to 30 supporters sat outside in a waiting room.

At the center of Soli's case -- he has sought to make it several times over the past two decades -- were texts of interviews with Hurtado that were conducted in the 1980s, which Soli has found out about in the past several years. He sought to show that the interviews, including one with Amnesty International, showed that Hurtado claimed to have participated in torture.

Hurtado said that he saw others commit torture and that he underwent police training in torture in which police used techniques on each other, but that he never performed it on a prisoner. About the interviews, he said, "Sometimes I may have exaggerated a little bit. I was describing what other people were doing."

His attorneys, Ken Tilsen and Ron Rosenbaum, opposed admitting the Amnesty International document, saying it did not appear to be a transcript but rather some type of summary.

Immigration Judge Robert Vinikoor, who came from Chicago to preside at the hearing, said that on the basis of other court decisions, it would be insufficient for Soli to show that Hurtado engaged in general abuses, and that Soli must prove he committed specific acts of torture with dates and places. Soli produced few specifics at the hearing.

Vinikoor closely questioned Hurtado, wondering how he could deny committing atrocities, when the Amnesty International statement quoted him as saying he had attached electrical wires to people in torture situations. It was unclear what he thought of Hurtado's statement that he only did it when trainees tried it on each other.

Nor is it clear how important the statement will be, because the judge has yet to rule on whether the Amnesty document will be admitted.