http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3215968

June 8, 2005, 6:11AM

Teen from China sees asylum as only hope

Immigrant fears a smuggling gang will kill him if he is deported
By EDWARD HEGSTROM
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

When Young Zheng's lawyer initially failed to prevent his deportation back to China, the 17-year-old immigrant took matters into his hands.

Handcuffed and escorted by U.S. immigration officers to a plane bound for China early this year, the teen momentarily escaped and slammed his head into an airport wall so hard that he blacked out and had to be hospitalized. So intense is his fear of returning to face his smugglers in China that Zheng says he is willing to do anything to stay here.

"They will kill me if I go back," he said in a brief telephone interview Tuesday from a juvenile detention center where he is being held in the Houston area. Zheng said both his uncle in the Midwest and his father back in China have received threatening phone calls from his smugglers demanding more than $50,000 for bringing him into the United States.

The government plans to deport Zheng on Friday. His new lawyers in Houston are scrambling to convince federal courts to reopen his case and grant him asylum based on the likelihood that he will be tortured or even killed in China by the smuggling gangs, known as snakeheads, who first brought him to the United States in 2003.

But federal attorneys say Zheng does not qualify for asylum because he is not being threatened by Chinese government officials.

The outcome of that legal debate will determine the future of a teen who was just beginning to adjust to life in the United States. Before his detention last April, Zheng was set free and allowed to live with his uncle for more than six months. He started high school and was making straight A's as a freshman ESL student.

"Young is honest, thoughtful, dependable, and displays a high degree of integrity," a teacher wrote in a letter to the court.

His attorney contends Zheng has been disowned by his father and is now threatened by smugglers because he was doing his best to follow the rules. Had he disappeared like so many illegal immigrants, he could have gone to work and paid off the debt the snakeheads seek to collect.

"That's the great irony here," said John Sullivan, an attorney at Fulbright and Jaworski who has volunteered to take the case.

Zheng comes from Fujian, a poor province in southeast China notorious for its snakeheads. The teen was his parents' second child in a country where the government has a policy permitting only one child per couple.

"People (did) not treat me well," he said.

So Zheng's father agreed to pay $60,000 to have him smuggled to the United States when he was 14. As is customary, the family paid only a percentage â€â€