Help Wanted
Fleeing torture and death threats in their home countries, asylum seekers face a rocky road to freedom in the U.S.
By Yasmin Khan
Matilde De la Sierra was going stir crazy. After many months of seclusion in the cavernous house and clinic where she worked as a doctor in a little Guatemalan village, she just wanted to go for a walk through the countryside. So, even though she had been receiving death threats and the town priest who usually accompanied her when she went out was unavailable, she slipped out of the building and walked around town, enjoying the fresh, cool mountain air under a full moon.
That night in 1995, two men caught De la Sierra. They tortured her all night. “I asked them to kill me, but they said, ‘No, those are not the orders,’” chokes the tiny, fine-featured De la Sierra, now 42. “That was the end of my life.”
But it was just the start of a long, complex journey. De la Sierra had been targeted by the Guatemalan military regime because she worked to help poor Mayan people in her clinic, people the government said were communist supporters. It was work her father had done before her, and it got him kidnapped and murdered 14 years earlier. Fearing for her life, De la Sierra fled to the U.S. to seek political asylum, where she found safety but no rest.
Like De la Sierra, thousands of asylum seekers arrive in the U.S. every year, looking for shelter from persecution, torture and death. And like her, they face a tough life here as well, threatened with jail, ineligible to work legally, separated from their countrymen, with no access to housing or health care assistance. Unlike refugees, those seeking political asylum must prove they have a “well-founded fear” of returning to their country, and recent anti-terrorist legislation has made that burden of proof even heavier.
After being detained and tortured, De la Sierra spent the next months trying to find a safe place to live, moving around Guatemala and even going to Costa Rica for a month. “My good friend said that I needed to leave the country. But just for a while. Just until the military forgets about me,” she recalls, sitting in the children’s library of Sacred Heart School. But every time she tried to return to Guatemala, the letters and phone calls started, telling her that she would end up like her father.
Finally, in December 1995, a human rights organization wrangled De la Sierra a five-year visitor’s visa, and she took a plane to Los Angeles. “I left without wanting to come to the United States. I was tortured. And plus, now another gift is that I have to leave my country. It was not just that I was going to another country, it was that I was going to the United States.” says De la Sierra, who didn’t speak English at the time.
From the moment she arrived in the airport, De la Sierra was struck by how mistrusting U.S. immigration officials were. They didn’t believe that she was a doctor and sent her to an interrogation room. Facing two suspicious uniformed men was more than De la Sierra could take. “I was crying. I was hoping they would say I was a liar and that I wasn’t a doctor and would send me back,” she says. “But I had a flashback. I only remember that I was in the corner of the room trying to avoid them.”
De la Sierra says she doesn’t know why the officials let her go. Maybe they had pity on her. Maybe they were afraid of her. But when she woke up, they told her she needed to run to catch her plane.
De la Sierra flew to Mesa, Arizona where a friend of a friend in Guatemala had found her a place to live, a house run by a nun, Sister Nancy. It didn’t work because the center was geared toward economic immigrants, not tortured asylum seekers. De la Sierra didn’t like living in a group home and being pressured to tell her story. Leaving Sister Nancy’s house started a series of housing troubles that had her moving another three times in less than two months. She was reclusive and never talked about what happened to her. She thinks that is why people didn’t feel comfortable with her and always kicked her out after just a few weeks. A volunteer who worked with immigrants told her she would have to ask for political asylum if she were to stay in the U.S. “They told me I was in exile and that I needed to ask for political asylum,” she says. “I remember feeling it here in my chest, thinking ‘political asylum? In exile?’ I am asking this country for political asylum? I just wanted my papers to work and do what I had to do to be here.”
Arizona provided no relief, so De la Sierra moved to Florida for five months, where her brother and his family lived. She wanted to resolve her problems on her own, so she hadn’t asked her brother for help. Her family thought she was still living at Sister Nancy’s and she still hadn’t shared the story of her torture with anyone, not her lawyer, not her family. The once outgoing and independent De la Sierra was introverted and quiet. She cried a lot. She had flashbacks. She didn’t feel right staying with her brother and his small children.
When De la Sierra heard about a refugee house in Chicago called Su Casa, run by a Christian organization, she decided to leave Florida. “I thought, this is my number six house. But they gave me my own room.”
Throughout all this, while waiting for asylum, De la Sierra didn’t have the papers to work in the U.S., and she refused to work illegally, in part because of her fear that under-the-table employment could ruin her chances for a visa. She depended on institutions such as Su Casa and the carefully doled out the bit of money she had been given by a friend when she left Guatemala.
Two years after she had applied, she got her work visa. She began busing tables in a casino in Mesa, where she moved to be closer to the lawyer working on her asylum case. It was hard work, but she wasn’t allowed to practice medicine. “I thought gosh, these people are very proud. They are the best, they have the power, they have everything, and they really put us foreigners down. I can work as a doctor. I know the things that you know. I studied nine years in my country, and now I have to study four years again?” she says.
