Seeking asylum, Part III: THE WAIT

BY KAYLEE TORNAY OF THE MAIL TRIBUNE August 14, 2018

Editor's note: This article is the final installment of a three-day series on the Gonzalez family's experience pursuing asylum in the United States. Read Part One here. Read Part Two here. To find out more about how we reported this series, click here.

Estéban, Lizet and their father, Jonathan Gonzalez, wait on the green-cushioned benches of Judge Patricia Crain’s Jackson County juvenile courtroom as other cases are heard. Seated among the neat rows, 14-year-old Estéban wears a bomber-style jacket, Jonathan a tucked-in, button-down shirt and 11-year-old Lizet a black patterned coat.

When it’s their turn, their lawyer, Kevin Stout, leads the three of them to the front on the defendant side. An interpreter sits between them, relaying Crain’s questions into Spanish as she asks their names, how old they are and what brought them here.

The children, through Stout, are asking Crain for more time in their father’s care in Southern Oregon until they are scheduled for deportation back to El Salvador, where they fled gang violence in December.

Before she decides to extend their waiting period until February 2019, Crain asks Estéban another question: Is he afraid to go back to the country that was home for all but the last six months of his 14 years?

It’s the kind of question that he and Lizet will face again and again from agents of U.S. law. How effectively the children, or at least Stout, demonstrate that their fear of persecution is both credible and inescapable in El Salvador will determine whether they will be granted protection in the U.S. as asylees.

Read the full story at the Mail Tribune here.