Insane asylum
Editor's Note, 01.30.2006: Khaled, Anya, and Mona Darzi are false names used to protect the identity of the real family interviewed for this story. For more information, please see the explanation at the bottom of this story.
In immigration court in Atlanta, where every year thousands of undocumented aliens learn whether they will be deported, there is no bailiff to announce the arrival of a judge. And so for the last 15 minutes on this Wednesday in January, all eyes have been focused on the door that leads to the judge's chambers. The only sound in this windowless room with the drop ceiling and dingy blue walls is the ventilation whirring quietly above.
On today's docket is just one case -- the matter of 41-year-old Khaled Darzi and his family, who have lived in the United States for almost seven years. In 1997, they fled their native Iran, where Khaled had become a marked man. The Darzis are Kurds, and for years, as Khaled tells it, he had helped Kurdish rebels in their struggles against Iran's Islamic authorities. He had seen friends killed and his family pharmacy confiscated. He had been blackmailed, shot at and imprisoned.
Since coming to the United States, Khaled's family has grown. When they arrived, he and his wife, Anya, had two children; they now have four. Today, Khaled works as an electrician and Anya sells perfume at a department store. They make monthly mortgage and car payments, but they can't afford health insurance. Their oldest daughter just started college. They live on a quiet street outside of Marietta with leafy trees and shiny Hondas in the driveways. They are, in essence, Americans in everything but name.
For seven years, the Darzis and the U.S. government have been engaged in an odd dance, with the Darzis trying to convince the government that they should be allowed to forever enjoy the protections and privileges of life here, and the government putting up steady resistance. Over time, that resistance has stiffened. In March 1999, an immigration judge denied their asylum claim, ruling they had failed to establish a "well-founded fear of persecution" if they returned to Iran. An appeal followed. Last February, after an attorney failed to notify them that their appeal had been denied, immigration officers swooped down on the Darzi house.
It was a weekday morning. Mona, who at 18 is the oldest child and last February was just a few months from graduating high school, heard a commotion outside. Car doors slammed shut. A half-dozen men and women stomped up the wooden steps to the front door. They were immigration officers, come to deport the Darzis back to Iran.
In the Darzis' living room, the agents told the family to pack their bags. But there was a complication. What was to be done with the Darzis' youngest children, Connie and Tina, who, because they were born in the United States, were Americans? What's more, Anya, who was breast-feeding her youngest child, refused to leave without her children.
The officers made a phone call. They would leave Anya and her children. But they would take Khaled to Etowah Detention Center, in Gadsden, Ala. At home, Anya gathered the relatives who lived in the Atlanta area. They called attorney after attorney. Finally they reached Glenn Fogle, an immigration lawyer to whom stories such as this are nothing new. Fogle got Khaled released from jail, where he ended up spending 100 days, and filed a motion to re-open the family's asylum case based on new grounds -- Anya and her oldest daughter's conversion from Islam to Christianity within the last year. In Iran, the punishment for apostasy is death.
Today in court are not just the Darzis, but members of Eastside Baptist Church, where Anya worships. They are here to testify, if called upon, that Anya's conversion was genuine, and not a last-ditch ploy to secure asylum.
The Darzis' fate will be determined by William Cassidy, one of the toughest immigration judges in the country. To win an asylum case before Cassidy is something of a minor miracle. In a stretch of almost four years leading up to last October, Cassidy considered 593 asylum requests and granted only 34. Many of those applications were from people fleeing some of the most repressive and violent regimes in the world. For example, Cassidy received 29 asylum applications from Liberia; he granted none. He received 16 from Congo; he granted none. He received 56 from Colombia; he granted none. He received 112 from China; he granted one.
The nation's 220 immigration judges deny roughly two asylum cases for every one they grant; Cassidy, on the other hand, rejects more than 10 asylum applications for every approval. His two colleagues in Atlanta, Paul Johnston and Mackenzie Rast, are barely any kinder. Their approval rates are a few tenths of a percentage point higher than Cassidy's.
"This is the hardest place in America to get an asylum case approved," says Dale Schwartz, an immigration attorney in Atlanta and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The prospects of winning an asylum case here are so dismal, in fact, that many attorneys say they won't take asylum cases, or they'll suggest that a client move to another district to improve their chances of finding a sympathetic judge.
The vast disparities from city to city -- and from judge to judge -- raise questions about the application of justice in asylum cases. Is it fair, for example, that a Somali statistically has a better chance for asylum in a court in Memphis than in an Atlanta court? Is it fair that cases can be won and lost based on whether an applicant looks a judge in the eye, or becomes agitated during questioning, or if the testimony appears "rehearsed"? Is it fair that an applicant's chance of winning asylum depends more on which judge hears the case rather than on that case's merits?
"It should be clear that if a judge has an approval rate of 3 percent and the national rate is twenty-something percent, that there's something wrong with how that judge is evaluating cases," says Laura Lichter, a Denver attorney and committee chair within the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "We're talking about people's lives.
"Yes, there is fraud in the system. But the vast majority of the people who have made it here to even be in front of a judge have some very legitimate claims. I think it's just tragic how the system is failing them."
But as the minutes tick by on this January day, with the Darzis awaiting the arrival of the judge, the system is all they have. Finally, the door opens and Cassidy appears. He is a man in his 50s, with a head full of dark hair flecked with gray. As he adjusts his black robe, everyone on the hard wooden benches begins to rise in deference. He holds out an arm and shakes his head. "No, you don't need to stand," he says.
He invites Fogle and the government attorney back into his chambers to discuss the case. As the door clicks shut behind them, Marty Godfrey, associate pastor at Eastside and a family friend, turns to the Darzis.
"Now's the time to start prayin'," he says.
Asylum applications are filled with horror stories -- tales of rape, torture, forced amputations, murder, imprisonment. Some of the stories are true. Some of them are embellished, or made up out of whole cloth. Deciding which is which is often up to an immigration judge.
Although they wear robes and issue decisions from the bench, immigration judges aren't jurists in the conventional sense. They aren't tenured for life, nor are their decisions precedent-setting. In fact, they aren't even part of the judiciary arm of the government, but rather the executive branch. They are civil servants and their boss is the U.S. attorney general. They even have their own union, the National Association of Immigration Judges, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. In Atlanta, each of the three judges earns $136,656 a year.
In the 2002 fiscal year, immigration courts handled 73,000 asylum cases. Of those, 734 were heard by immigration judges in Atlanta.
The law is clear on who should get asylum: those who have a "well-founded fear of persecution." What isn't so clear is how "well-founded" should be defined -- despite a 1987 Supreme Court ruling that went so far as to reduce that probability to a number. "There is simply no room," one justice wrote, "for concluding that because an applicant only has a 10 percent chance of being shot, tortured or otherwise persecuted, that he or she has no well-founded fear of the event happening."
Asylum advocates praised the so-called "10 percent standard," believing that by essentially lowering an applicant's burden of proof, more asylum cases would be granted. After all, advocates often say, a person fleeing persecution usually doesn't carry with him a note from his dictator.
Seventeen years later, however, that standard is hardly the norm in immigration courts. "Most immigration judges don't comply with that 10 percent reasonable possibility," says Joseph Vail, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former immigration judge in that city. "They're still stuck with that old mindset -- 'You might be lying to me.'" That standard may keep out people who are lying, Vail says, but it also keeps out people who are telling the truth.
The question, of course, is which is more important. "I think what is more important is protecting the guy who may get killed if he goes back to his country, as opposed to somebody who might sneak in and fraudulently get asylum," Vail says. During his four years as an immigration judge, Vail figures, he's granted between 25 percent and 30 percent of the asylum cases that have come before him, making him among the least strict in the nation.
Often, an applicant's entire claim comes down to credibility. "Asylum, more than any other area of immigration law, really depends on the word of the individual," Vail says. "The biggest piece of evidence in any asylum case is the applicant's testimony and his statement. And you really don't have much to go on but your own gut feeling about whether they're telling you the truth or whether they're lying."
In criminal courts, there is a presumption of innocence on the part of a defendant. For an undocumented alien seeking asylum, there is rarely presumption of integrity -- especially among immigration judges who have backgrounds as prosecutors.
In October 2000, the San Jose Mercury News reported that most of the nation's immigration judges had previously worked for the government, often as prosecutors, whose job it was to build cases against immigrants. Judges whose background was in private practice, however, were 50 percent more likely to grant asylum than those who came from the government side of the aisle.
"If you've worked for the government for a long period of time and you've seen your share of fraud -- because there is some fraud -- then you come in with the mindset of, 'I really have to be careful about what I grant because they might be lying to me'," says Vail. Facing that mindset, Vail says, asylum applicants come into court "with the deck stacked against them."
As it happens, all three of Atlanta's immigration judges -- Cassidy, Johnston and Rast -- have extensive backgrounds as government attorneys. Prior to becoming an immigration judge in 1990, Rast served as a prosecutor in Florida for 12 years. Johnston spent 25 years in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps before being tapped as an immigration judge in December 2000. But of all the judges' backgrounds, it is Cassidy's that would best foreshadow his strict rulings from the bench. After five years as a prosecutor in Ohio, Cassidy in 1987 spent the next five years both as an attorney for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and as director of training at INS headquarters in Washington, D.C.
As an INS attorney in Cleveland, he prosecuted companies that didn't have proper documentation to prove their workers were American.
David Leopold, an immigration attorney in Cleveland, recalls only one case in which he went up against Cassidy. "He was an excellent lawyer," Leopold says. "He was tough and he was fair. He was what he should have been."
Another Ohio attorney, Marian Brumbaugh, recalls Cassidy as a "very good prosecutor" who was "one of the most personable people you could ever meet."
Brumbaugh, who never had an asylum case against Cassidy, says he frequently sought to negotiate cases to avoid coming before a judge. "[Cassidy] was used to making deals. He had been a prosecutor. He knew you can't try every case."
In October 1993, Cassidy was hired as an immigration judge. His first posting was New York City, one of the largest immigration courts in the country. Two years later, Cassidy transferred to Atlanta. He quickly gained a reputation as not only the toughest judge, but the fastest. From 1995 through most of 1999, according to published statistics, Cassidy granted asylum 71 times, while denying it in 3,846 cases. In that same time, he decided almost 800 cases more than his closest competitor nationwide. Lawyers call it Cassidy's "rocket docket."
But tough and fast weren't the only labels attached to Cassidy. Some Atlanta immigration attorneys began complaining among themselves that Cassidy just wasn't fair, and that no judge could grant so few asylum requests and possibly be adhering to the letter, much less the spirit, of asylum law.
In January 1997, Atlanta immigration attorney David Farshy filed a motion asking Cassidy to recuse himself from a case in which Farshy's client, a convicted kidnapper, had applied for asylum. Farshy believed he stood no chance with Cassidy, who, Farshy says, consistently ruled against his clients and repeatedly mispronounced his name as "Farsy." ("It was demeaning," Farshy says now.) On April 15, Cassidy called Farshy's office to talk about the case. After leaving a message on Farshy's answering machine, Cassidy, evidently believing he had hung up, resumed a conversation with government attorney Grace Sease, who was in the judge's office. Farshy's machine recorded what was said.
"The board is not going to uphold me, but hell, I am going to give him a hard way to go," Cassidy was recorded as saying. Sease, who is now an immigration judge in Pennsylvania, laughed.
To Farshy, the conversation was irrefutable evidence that Cassidy not only had engaged in ex parte communication -- talking with the government attorney without Farshy present -- but had pre-judged the case before it was even heard. The next day, Farshy submitted a transcript of the recorded conversation as further evidence that Cassidy should recuse himself. After reviewing the transcript, Cassidy agreed to recuse himself, according to a complaint that Farshy filed with Cassidy's bosses. But then, moments later, Cassidy reversed himself and announced he would remain as judge. He eventually denied the asylum request.
Farshy was flabbergasted. In his complaint, he wrote that "all of the ... actions and conducts were due to Judge Cassidy's intent to follow only his own personal prejudices and bias, in expense of compromising law and justice."
In the final sentence of his three-and-a-half-page complaint, Farshy wrote, "I cannot trust such a judge and in my opinion no one else should trust him."
Farshy appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which, a year later, ruled that Cassidy's actions "raised the appearance of impropriety and should have led to a finding that he was disqualified from hearing the case." But Cassidy's ultimate decision -- to deny asylum -- had been correct, the board ruled. And so, because what really mattered to the board was Cassidy's final decision, not the way in which he made it, the board deemed his error "harmless."
In September 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility, in response to Farshy's complaint, acknowledged that Cassidy had made brief ex parte comments about Farshy's client's case. Nevertheless, Cassidy's conduct "did not constitute professional misconduct or poor judgment." Nor, the investigation concluded, did Cassidy issue an erroneous decision or "pre-judge the matter."
Today, it is the rare case that brings Farshy before Cassidy. That, and a lingering resentment over how his complaints went nowhere, have left Farshy with a candor not often found among Atlanta's immigration attorneys.
"I guess he just wants to kiss the government's ass, which I think is terrible," Farshy says. "He's a political person and he'll do anything to protect his job."
The rules governing immigration judges forbid them from talking to the press, meaning Cassidy could not comment for this story. But among his defenders is at least one prominent immigration attorney in Atlanta.
"I know Judge Cassidy personally," says Charles Kuck, who is national secretary for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "He's actually a great guy. He lives right by me. I get along really well with him. He goes out of his way to help people. He just doesn't grant very many asylum cases."
There are a few reasons for that, Kuck says. "There's a lot of bad asylum cases. That accounts for a lot of Judge Cassidy's denials." That, combined with what Kuck says is Cassidy's "restrictive" view of asylum, skew the judge's statistics.
Still, Kuck has lost enough asylum cases to know the game. "A lot of times, if we think a guy has a good case but the factual scenario is not one the judge [here] will believe to be meeting the criteria for asylum -- but I know that judges in Maryland or Miami will -- a lot of times, you tell your client, 'Your best option is to move.'"
Last year, the head of the judges' union, Dana Marks Keener, who is an immigration judge herself in San Francisco, wrote a letter to an immigration lawyers' website, warning about the perils of "any perspective that reduces judicial performance to a numbers game."
"Some judges have dockets which include many strong asylum cases, but others have more cases with old claims from countries where conditions have greatly improved; other reasons vary from city to city, depending on case assignments."
Keener wrote that the correct standard by which a judge should be measured is not "inherently misleading" statistics, but whether their decisions are "well-reasoned and in accord with controlling legal precedent, on a case-by-case basis."
One Cassidy case involved a 19-year-old man who was detained at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport last March after trying to enter the United States with a fake Zambian passport. He said his name was Ilunga Wa Ilunga. He had come from Congo, he explained, by way of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. In Cassidy's court three months later, he represented himself. Through his testimony and his asylum application, the following story emerged:
Ilunga grew up in Zaire, where his father worked for the government of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. (In 1997, Seko fled to Morocco after his forces were overthrown by Laurent Kabila, who renamed the country Congo.) Ilunga and his sister -- whose husband was executed by Kabila's forces -- were arrested. In jail, guards would "take a rope, some kind of a rope, and tie it to a brick, and they would tie the other end to my testicles. Then I would have to stand." He was also beaten with a belt and kicked.
His sister began throwing up blood. "They were scared and they released us," Ilunga testified. But before he could take her to the hospital, his sister died.
Soon, tribal fighting within Congo erupted. "People were just dying all over the place," he testified. Ilunga worked for the Red Cross, helping to bury the dead. They decided to report human rights abuses to foreign governments. At one point, Ilunga wrote an article about the tragic events.
In 2001, four soldiers came to Ilunga's house. They tried to rape his mother; she resisted, and they shot her four times. They raped his pregnant wife in front of him.
"I didn't have any choice," he testified. "I run away."
When Ilunga arrived in the United States, he had a briefcase of documentation -- a briefcase that was confiscated by immigration authorities and, Ilunga testified, lost by them. During his hearing, a few snapshots of the town he grew up in were Ilunga's only evidence.
At his hearing, a government lawyer asked Ilunga what medical treatment he received after being released from jail.
"I received some treatment, but it was not medical. It was like a natural treatment, traditional treatment."
"OK. And do you have any verification of this treatment, any proof of this treatment?"
"The treatment, traditional treatment which ..."
"Yes."
"Yes. I have some tattoo to show it."
"A tattoo. Do you have any written documentation to verify that you received treatment?"
"You mean some written document?"
"Yes."
"We don't know that in our, in our country. Sometime even if you go to a normal hospital, they won't give you any written document."
In fact, Ilunga had documentation for virtually nothing. He had no copy of the article that he said he'd written, no death certificates for the family members who he said had been killed, no hospital records, nothing. He had only his testimony. He could not even prove he was from Congo.
Cassidy concluded that Ilunga's statement was not credible. He cited many reasons. For instance, Cassidy called into question the circumstances of Ilunga's release from prison.
"His father being the head of the secret service under Mobutu, such a recognized violator of human rights, and he is the leader of the secret service in the area, if in fact this is true, which the Court questions, the release of the sister just because she was throwing [up] blood seems to be inconsistent with how the Kabila group may handle the direct relatives of someone who is head of the secret service for Mobutu."
Cassidy also doubted Ilunga's testimony about the evening his wife was allegedly raped. "He stated that ... four military people arrived, ostensibly looking for him. He stands at the door. They go past him and they rape his wife in front of him. But somehow he is able to make his escape. The Court did not find that probable."
Moreover, Ilunga's written application for asylum (which was prepared with the help of a translator), omitted certain facts that came out during testimony.
Ilunga, Cassidy decided, "failed to establish a well-founded fear of persecution." Cassidy denied his asylum request.
When an immigration judge rejects an asylum application, the matter is frequently appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. In Ilunga's case, Fogle, the Darzis' attorney, took up the appeal. In his brief, Fogle said that Cassidy based his decision "solely on the fact" that he didn't believe Ilunga's testimony. "This does not amount to any specific and cogent reason for disbelief of his testimony," Fogle argued. The appeals board agreed, ruling that Cassidy had "relied mainly on speculation regarding the plausibility" of Ilunga's claim. The board upheld Ilunga's appeal, and he was granted asylum.
Less fortunate were two other clients of Fogle's. Both were Somali women who had made their way to America via Kenya. Both relayed horror stories of enslavement. One said she had been burned with cigarette butts and repeatedly raped, and that whenever she sees a Somali man, "I shiver." But in both cases, Cassidy doubted their credibility. In the case of the woman who said she'd been raped, Cassidy, in his decision, drew "adverse inference from her demeanor," noting that she had appeared "agitated and upset" in relating her testimony. In the other woman's case, Cassidy doubted her credibility because her testimony appeared memorized.
Like many of the asylum applicants who come before Judge Cassidy, Khaled Darzi didn't have much in the way of documentation when he first sought asylum from Cassidy in 1999. His story, though, was gripping.
Both he and his wife were born in Baneh, a city of 70,000 in western Iran that is largely Kurdish. Kurds are considered the world's largest ethnic group without their own country. Largely Sunni Muslim, the Kurdish population is 25 million, spread over Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Roughly a quarter of those Kurds live in Iran, most in the mountainous western region of the country, in cities such as Baneh.
In 1979, Khaled was 17 when Islamic fundamentalists overthrew the Shah. In return for their support, the Ayatollah Khomeini promised Kurds autonomy. When the promises went unfulfilled, fighting broke out between the Iranian government and the Kurd separatists. Darzi began ferrying medical supplies from the family pharmacy to rebels in the mountains surrounding Baneh. One day, government forces bombed a road on which Khaled and some compatriots were walking. He was the only one who survived; he still carries shrapnel in his right eye and right arm.
In 1987, assailants trying to break into the pharmacy shot at Khaled. He escaped unharmed, but the same men killed two of the Darzis' neighbors.
In 1990, the government arrested Khaled and his father, and confiscated the family pharmacy. They were charged with collaborating with the rebellion. Khaled served a year in jail, his father six months.
Anya's own family was active in the insurgency against the Ayatollah's regime. All three of her brothers served jail time, one for six years. As a teenager, she distributed anti-Khomeini leaflets around Baneh. She was arrested and jailed for a night.
In 1997, Khaled received a letter threatening his and his family's lives if he didn't hand over money. Khaled went to the police, who promised they would help him. On his way home, a bullet hit the side of his car. An hour later, the phone rang. From what the person told him, Khaled realized the police were in on the blackmail attempt. He decided, finally, to leave Iran with his wife and two children once and for all.
Khaled and his family had traveled to the United States once before. To ensure that they would return, the authorities had demanded they leave one child behind. So as he prepared to leave his country for good, Khaled paid for fake papers that would convince the authorities he had a third child. They arrived in America on May 14, 1997.
In denying the Darzis' application for asylum in March 1999, Cassidy cited discrepancies in dates between the family's written application and their testimony. He also doubted the Darzis' claim that they made up a third child in order to be allowed to leave Iran, especially considering that the Iranian police knew Khaled was a rebel sympathizer.
"Someone who is well known to the government, they should, and continue to know, how many people are in his family," Cassidy said in his oral decision. "I did not find the story regarding the alleged made-up child that allowed the whole family to enter the United States to be telling, to be credible."
In the end, Cassidy determined that Iran "seeks no harm against this individual, has not singled him out for any type of mistreatment." He denied the asylum application.
Like most unsuccessful asylum applicants, Darzi appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals. Ideally, the appeals board is a great equalizer, a safety net for those immigrants on the wrong end of a bad decision. There, a panel of three board members would review each case, deciding whether the judge's decision had been right or wrong. As Kuck says, "That's where the mistakes are supposed to be corrected."
But in 2002, to clear a backlog of 56,000 cases, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced sweeping changes at the appeals board. Instead of increasing the number of members to deal with the backlog, he cut the number from 23 to 11 -- "one of the dumber ideas out of John Ashcroft's brain," Kuck says. He eliminated de novo review of facts -- that is, a review of cases from the beginning. What's more, no longer would each case be examined by the three-member panel. Instead, most cases would be ruled on by one member, who would issue a "summary affirmance" -- a one-line endorsement of the immigration judge's decision. Only "more complex and difficult" cases would warrant a three-member panel. (Ilunga's case, as it happens, was one of them.)
Asylum advocates were outraged, charging that the switch would deny immigrants their right to due process. And although Ashcroft's stated intentions were to speed up a glacial bureaucracy, his choice of which board members to keep and which members to fire smacked of politics.
"That whole process was clearly intended not just to move cases along," says Vail, the former immigration judge. "If you look at the people who were removed from the board, they essentially removed everyone who was considered liberal or moderate. ... What they've done with the board is absolutely terrible."
Ashcroft's rubber-stamping initiative -- and his gutting of the board -- cleared the backlog in mere months, but not without consequences. The burden has simply shifted to the federal courts, which is the next step for undocumented aliens dissatisfied with the board's rulings. In the year after Ashcroft made his changes, appeals of decisions almost quadrupled. In Atlanta, home of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, there were 67 immigration-related appeals filed in 2001. In 2003, there were 367, according to court clerk Thomas Kahn.
Unfortunately for asylum applicants, the 11th Circuit Court has the reputation of being the toughest on asylum applications. Indeed, immigration attorneys can't recall the last time the appeals court here decided an asylum case in favor of the immigrant.
While Fogle and the government attorney, Molly Frazer, discuss the Darzi case, Cassidy emerges to explain that if the two sides can strike an agreement, there will be no need for a hearing. "I only deal in cases of controversy," he says.
But no agreement is reached, and the hearing begins. As in other court proceedings, witnesses must be sequestered before they testify, so everyone but Anya, who is the first witness, files outside. Cassidy swears her in. She sits on the edge of the chair and smiles nervously. A tissue box sits on the table next to her. She talks so softly that Cassidy asks her several times to speak up.
From his chair, Fogle clicks his blue pen and starts to ask her what first brought her to church. Anya explains that she went to church periodically with Angela, her sister-in-law. One day, she discovered that her daughter, Mona, had been baptized and hadn't told her parents. Anya says she became even more interested. At church, she found the congregants honest. "They were very loving people," she explains.
In November 2002, she decided to become a Christian. Cassidy asks her when she was baptized.
"April 17," she says.
"This was after your husband was arrested?" he asks.
"Yes."
Fogle asks what will happen if she returns to Iran as a Christian.
"How do I describe it? Here we have freedom. There, everyone will ignore me. I can say they will kill me. I have seen the effect over there."
"The same for your children?" Fogle asks.
"Yes."
"Has your husband converted?"
"No."
"You're still working on him?"
Anya smiles. "Yes, hopefully."
Soon it is Frazer's turn. At the time of Anya's conversion, the Darzis had lost their asylum case. Why, Frazer wants to know, did she convert knowing she might be returning to Iran?
"When God comes into your life, you ... I really didn't care about this," Anya says.
"You weren't worried about being killed?"
"I didn't think about that."
Frazer starts quizzing Anya's knowledge of Christianity. It is a common tactic in cases such as these. Anya gets flustered as she tries to name the Holy Trinity. "Father, son ... and God," she says.
Frazer moves on. She asks Anya to name a few books of the Bible, to list the sacraments, to give some differences between the Old and New Testaments. Anya is visibly nervous. Her hands are clasped tightly together.
"The Old is about law. The New is ... we pray, we worship, we help each other."
Fogle next calls Angela Darzi. Fogle asks her what changes she's detected in her sister-in-law since her conversion to Christianity.
"Profound changes," Angela says. "She's studying the word of God on her own. ... Ever since then, she's had a peace about her."
Cassidy asks what other ways Anya has "manifested her new belief in Christianity."
"She's taking the initiative to go to church and pray," Angela says. "She asks a lot of in-depth questions."
"What type?" Frazer asks.
"The trinity," Angela says. "She knows what the trinity means, but [wants to know] what the Holy Spirit has to offer."
Angela talks more about her relatives' fear of returning to Iran as Kurds.
Frazer cuts to the point: "Is it possible her conversion is a way to stay in the U.S.?"
"No," Angela says. "She's not like that."
The third witness is Mona Darzi. She is poised and assured, and speaks without a trace of an accent. She explains on the stand that she was never a religious person, but after going to church with her aunt Angela, she decided that Christianity was for her.
"Everything I was going through, they were talking about," she says.
With a friend, Mona was baptized. But she didn't tell her mother. "I was afraid to tell her because I didn't know how she would react." But when Anya found the baptism certificate, Mona says, "she was fine with it."
Frazer asks Mona how her mother's "behavior" has changed since her conversion.
"She talks about how she felt like a new person, like how something went through her." She noticed that her mother began reading the Bible every night.
As each witness finishes testifying, they are allowed to remain in the courtroom. When Mona finishes, she walks to her mother, who has been smiling. They sit on the same bench.
"You can sit closer to your mom," Cassidy says good-naturedly. "It's not like class here. You're not gonna get any questions later."
The final witness is Godfrey, the associate pastor. After he is sworn in and takes his seat, Cassidy asks if Godfrey has ever rejected any candidate for baptism.
"Yes," Godfrey replies.
"How often?"
"Not very often."
Cassidy explains his point. "This conversion occurred after her husband was arrested, after the order of deportation," he says. "The immigration laws look askance at last-minute conversions." Still, he says, the law allows for them if they are genuine.
Godfrey nods. He leans forward slightly with his hands steepled in his lap. He explains that it is clear to him when someone is undergoing a deep life change such as a conversion. In Anya's case, there was a "peace she was looking for internally."
"There's a difference when someone attends church out of ritual," he says. With Anya, her conversion is characterized by "less than a religious fervor than by wanting to understand the Bible."
This seems enough for Cassidy. He explains that he will grant the request. All that's needed first is a fingerprint check on the Darzi family. If that goes through without a problem, they will get asylum. He compliments everyone's testimony, especially Mona's. "Nice job, Glenn," he says.
With that, they are done.
Anya is almost crying. She hugs her sister-in-law, her daughter, her husband. She hugs Fogle.
Outside, as they discuss where to celebrate, Khaled is grinning.
"I feel free. Before I felt heavy. Now I feel light."
Editor's Note, continued: The Darzi family agreed to be interviewed for
this story when it ran in print on February 26, 2004. At that time, they did
not realize that the story would be published on the Internet, and
potentially accessible by authorities in Iran. The Darzi family has Kurdish
relatives still living in Iran. Concerned for the well-being of their
relatives there, the Darzis contacted the author of the article. Creative
Loafing made the decision to keep the article online, but to change the
name of the family in order to protect the relatives still living in Iran.
