Professor Karen Greenberg provides her expert opinion on an article in The New Yorker that details a controversial asylum case involving a young mother from El Salvador who was kidnapped by guerrillas, and the broader implications its decision will have on immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S.
But in June, 2018, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews rulings made in immigration court, issued a two-to-one decision denying Ana’s most recent request to stay in the U.S. The judges, considering Ana’s captivity, decided that, because she had worked for the guerrillas, even under duress, she was not their victim but functionally a member of their group. “While the respondent’s assistance may have been relatively minimal, if she had not provided the cooking and cleaning services she was forced to perform, another person would have needed to do so,” they wrote, in an opinion called Matter of A–C–M–. Ana was ineligible for asylum, under a law called the material-support statute, because she had aided terrorists.
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The law was rarely invoked until shortly after 9/11, when Congress adopted it as part of the Patriot Act. In the eight years that followed, it was used in almost three-quarters of the nearly six hundred terrorism indictments in the U.S. “It’s the net that most terrorism suspects are brought in on,” Karen J. Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham’s law school, told me. The statute has been used to prosecute high-profile defendants: John Walker Lindh, an American who was accused, in 2002, of fighting for the Taliban; Iyman Faris, a truck driver from Ohio who attempted to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, in 2003; Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, one of Osama bin Laden’s sons-in-law; Colleen LaRose, a woman from Pennsylvania who was convicted, in 2014, of planning to murder a Swedish cartoonist who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad.