Jennie Guilfoyle, immigration lawyer. - By Jennie Guilfoyle

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Entry 5

Updated Friday, Jan. 11, 2002, at 12:03 PM ET

Who is this person?

In two weeks Catherine will go for her asylum interview. I'll accompany her to the Newark Asylum Office, which is located not in Newark but in Lyndhurst, N.J. It rests inconspicuously amid anonymous office parks, just down the street from a Medieval times theme restaurant. An asylum officer will question Catherine for an hour about why she's afraid to return home to Angola. It's supposed to be a non-confrontational interview; it's the officer's job to listen carefully to her story and decide first if she's telling the truth, and then if she merits asylum. If the officer believes her and all the documents we submitted prove her case, she'll be granted asylum and a chance to start her life over in safety. If the officer doesn't, Catherine will be sent to immigration court to plead her case in front of an immigration judge.

This morning Catherine and our student intern interpreter and I spend two hours rehearsing the interview. I play the role of the asylum officer and question her in detail about her five arrests, how and when and why she was beaten and jailed. We cover the outlines of her history, how and why her life unfolded as it did. Because she was married to a man who was active in an opposition political party, she was jailed, humiliated, and tortured five times in the last five years. But Catherine is more than the sum of her five stints in prison, far more than a collection of misery and suffering.

Catherine's old enough to be my mother and far more accomplished than I am. At times I don't feel old enough, experienced enough, to be her guide and authority on American immigration law. Like many of my clients, she's highly educated and accomplished. She was the first woman physicist in her central African nation, and she worked for years in a prominent position in a government laboratory. Outside her job, she was a tireless champion of the rights of women, chairing international associations for women's rights, conferring with world human rights leaders. She's a dignified matriarch with five children and numerous grandchildren. I call myself lucky to be spending time with her. The loss to her own country of Catherine is incalculable. The gain to us is great, and one of my most fervent hopes for my clients is that this country give them not only a chance to win asylum, but a chance to use their enormous talents and strengths. America would certainly be the richer.

I've worked with doctors, journalists, engineers, teachers, carpet weavers, architects, political leaders. To save their own lives, they've had to leave behind homes, families, professions to start over from the bottom. There is a Tibetan journalist who's selling flowers in a farmer's market; a Zambian doctor now desperate to get a job as a nurse; an Iraqi teacher busing tables in a diner. Catherine's living now in a tiny room a priest helps her pay for. She's eager to find work so she can support herself, so she can begin to start over in this unknown country where the winters are unexpectedly cold and the strangers on the subway silent and distant.

Later today I see Pauline from Burundi. Her three young children come with her so that we can take their photos for the asylum application. Her daughter's shy but gives me a lovely smile when I address her in French. If I could learn five more languages I'd do it in a heartbeat. The children troop into our conference room/library armed with markers and colored paper while Pauline and I review the new documents she's brought in. When we go in to collect them at the end of the session, I see that all the children have drawn the twin towers, hit and aflame. Here for only three months now, they're drawing what children all over America are drawing.

diary
entries

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Entry 5

Updated Friday, Jan. 11, 2002, at 12:03 PM ET

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Jennie Guilfoyle is a staff attorney and NAPIL Fellow at the New York Association for New Americans, where she represents asylum seekers and battered immigrant spouses.

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