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Asylum for Mexican Journalist United States
EL PASO, Texas January 2009 - A Mexican journalist seeking asylum in the United States after a series of stories about alleged Mexican military abuses of civilians has been released from an immigration jail after 7 months' detention.
Emilio Gutierrez Soto, had been jailed since June 2008, when he and his 15-year-old son crossed the U.S. border in Antelope Wells, N.M., a remote crossing about 200 miles west of El Paso, and asked U.S. authorities for protection.
Friday afternoon, he told reporters that he can never go back to Mexico and will find another country if U.S. authorities eventually deny his asylum request.
"I'm not going to return to Mexico," Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez has claimed he was receiving daily death threats for nearly two years because he reported that Mexican soldiers were abusing civilians while they searched homes for drug cartel members. He fled after a group of heavily armed men identifying themselves as soldiers ransacked his home.
Carlos Spector, Gutierrez's El Paso lawyer, said the 46-year-old reporter for the El Diario newspaper in Ascencion, Mexico, was abruptly released Thursday afternoon with little warning and no explanation from immigration authorities.
"All of the sudden in the morning they called him and he called me frantically thinking he may be transferred to another center," Spector said. "It was just because."
Gutierrez's son, Oscar, was released from a juvenile detention center in August and has been living with relatives in El Paso.
Fighting back tears, Gutierrez said immediately after his arrest he was reunited with his son and "just hugged and kissed him."
"My family is my son," Gutierrez said.
Leticia Zamarripa, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman in El Paso, declined to comment on the case.
"It's ICE policy not to comment on individual cases," Zamarripa said.
Gutierrez's asylum application is pending, though a hearing has not been scheduled.
More than 150 people from Mexico, including police officers, businessmen and at least one prosecutor, have sought asylum since October 2007, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in El Paso. Immigration law experts have said many of their cases may be hopeless, in large part because fear of crime is not generally grounds of political asylum.
Asylum seekers have to prove they are being persecuted because or race, religion, political view, nationality or membership in a particular group. They also have to show that the government is either unwilling or unable to protect them.
Gutierrez's case has garnered international attention and support from media groups.
In a statement issued Friday, Reporters Without Borders, a press freedom group in Paris, argued that forcing Gutierrez to return to Mexico would be a virtual death sentence.
Spector, who has previously won an asylum case for a Mexican citizen, said he believes Gutierrez has a strong case, given the ongoing drug cartel war more than 1,700 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, in the last 13 months and what he describes as the "massive oppression of reporters in Mexico." Media groups have said that Mexico is among the most dangerous places in the world to report.
In November, veteran crime reporter Armando Rodriguez, who had been writing extensively about the cartel war in Juarez, was killed outside his home as his young daughter looked on.
Abogados January 31, 2009 02:14 PM | Preguntas Para Abogados
