UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF IMMIGRATION REVIEW
IMMIGRATION COURT
BALITMORE, MARYLAND
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In the Matter of: )
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Joe ) File No.: A 000
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In removal proceedings )
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Immigration Judge: Elizabeth A. Kessler Next Hearing: Individual September 22, 2016, 9:00 AM
RESPONDENT’S AFFIDAVIT IN SUPPORT OF APPLICATION FOR
ASYLUM AND WITHHOLDING OF REMOVAL
Introduction
1. My name is Joe Doe. I was born on Date, 1990 in the department of Santa Barbara, in Honduras. Please do not send me back to Honduras. I will die there.
2. There are men there who want my father’s head, and they will kill me since they cannot get him. They have already tortured me before for the same reason. They beat me very badly on my head as they demanded to know where my father was. Now my hearing is not very good and I cannot hear from one of my ears at all.
3. My sister’s partner, Carlos, will also kill me if I go back to Honduras. He is part of the Mara 18 gang. I already confronted him once because I had to protect my little sister. I told him to stop beating my sister, but he wouldn’t listen. He threatened to kill me with a pipe gun. Now that my sister has left Carlos with their child and made a new life in the United States, he has all the more reason to kill me to get revenge on her.
My Father’s Role in My Life
4. My father, Jim Doe, left us for the first time when I was young. He hid his problems from my mother, my siblings and me. He would not say anything about them. The entire time I lived with him, he would always disappear for a day or two, and many times more. Whenever we asked him, “Dad, where were you?” he would order us not to ask him anything. He kept his problems to himself. Even his mother, my grandmother, would say that my father had always been like this.
Family Life in Honduras
5. My mother, Jane Doe, my six siblings and I had a very hard time while I was growing up. My father was also very abusive with my mother, and would be violent towards me too when I tried to protect her. We lived for a while with my paternal grandmother in Santa Barbara. Then, my father disappeared for a long time. I heard that he went to Belize. My mother had to send me and some of my siblings to live with my aunt and uncle and sometimes with my maternal grandmother when I was younger, while she went to work in factories.
6. We were very poor, and didn’t even have enough to pay for things like doctors. For example, one time my leg almost had to be amputated because my mother couldn’t afford medical help right away after I had an accident. After one of my father’s disappearances, my mother got together with another man to help her get by, but I didn’t want to live with them because he also hit her. He was a drunk. He beat her all the time, and tried to hit my siblings. He beat her very badly with a machete and then disappeared. We eventually moved to Villanueva, which is about two hours away from Santa Barbara. By that time I was older so I helped my mother earn money for our family. She worked in a factory in Villanueva and would sell food to the people in the factory to make more money. I helped her sell food during the day and went to school in the evening or when I could.
7. While we were in Villanueva, I had a girlfriend named Erin. She was a lot older than me – I was fourteen and she was eighteen. When her parents found out that we had sex in her house without their permission, they got very angry and beat Erin. Erin’s father was very involved in the Catholic Church and wanted his daughter to stay a virgin until she was married. He did not like me because he wanted someone older to provide for his daughter, and called me a bum for not working. He said if I didn’t take responsibility for Erin, since she was a virgin, he would have me arrested. I could not work enough to provide for Erin because I was only fourteen and still in school, so my mother took Erin into our home after this happened, and eventually Erin became my partner.
8. I had two children with Erin, May who is nine years old and June who is five years old. Erin and I broke up before I left Honduras, and she wasn’t even living with me anymore when I was tortured, but I continued to support my children because I love them. I did not mention that I had children during my interview with the asylum officer, and I am sorry. Before my interview I had gotten into a big argument with Erin.I have felt a lot of nerves since I was tortured and hit in the head in Honduras, and always am thinking about my problems. There were a lot of things going on in my head during my interview, and I didn’t want to think about Erin, so I didn’t mention my children. That was wrong because our children don’t have anything to do with their parents’ problems. I am very sorry.
9. When I was around seventeen-years-old, my mother came to the United States. She couldn’t earn enough money to support us in Honduras so she left me in charge of my siblings. I was the second oldest of my siblings but my older brother, Fred, had a mind like a child’s so my mother could not rely on him. I promised my mother to watch over my siblings. I paid the rent, got us food, and raised my siblings and my children with Erin’s help. My mother asked my aunt in Santa Barbara to look in on us now and then, but we lived in our own home first in Villanueva then in Santa Barbara. My mother would help us by sending money from the United States to help pay for the rent.
Threats from My Sister’s Partner, Carlos
10. I had problems with a dangerous man in Honduras named Carlos because I tried to protect my younger sister, August Doe; she is the oldest of my three sisters. I was taking care of her after my mother left, but then when she was still very young, she left to move in with her boyfriend, Carlos. Carlos was not good for my sister. He is dangerous. He is involved in the Mara 18 gang as a lookout.
11. In all the years that August lived with Carlos in Villanueva, she barely had contact with me and the rest of our family. She didn’t know what was going on in our lives. She stayed with Carlos until after I fled to the United States. Carlos was a bad man and he didn’t allow her to go out or have contact with us. She only really spoke to us during moments when she escaped and took a cell phone and could calls us, but these were for short periods of time.
12. Even so, I found out that Carlos was abusing August. One day when I stopped by Erin’s parents’ house in Villanueva, August was there with Erin. She was acting very strange and had bruises all over her body. At first she didn’t want to tell me the truth, and told me she had fallen down, but those weren’t the types of bruises a person gets when they fall down. They were the types of bruises a person gets when they are beaten with a belt or chord of some sort. August didn’t want to tell me because she didn’t want me to cause problems, but after she left Erin told me Carlos had given August those bruises.
13. I went up to Carlos and August’s house to confront Carlos. I knew that confronting someone in the M-18 gang was dangerous, but I am a man and I was protecting my sister. A person doesn’t think twice about protecting their sister. All I could think about was that I had to do something to stop this. I went up to Carlos’s house. I don’t remember where August was when I got there, but Carlos was there and I argued with him outside of his house.
14. I told Carlos that beating my sister was wrong, and he had to stop. I told him that August had a brother who would protect her. Carlos said that I shouldn’t get involved. He said that August was his woman and so he could do whatever he wanted with her.
15. He went inside of his house for a minute and came back out with a homemade pipe gun called a chimba or arma chiza and then threatened me with the gun. He told me not to get involved, because he would kill me if I did. He said he would kill me or kill August if I stayed. I left to calm down the situation, but I told him he should not dare to touch my sister again. I learned afterwards that Carlos kept on abusing August, but August never told me about it.
My Father’s Problems and Disappearance
16. Some time after August left to live with Carlos in Villanueva, my father came back into our lives. I was living with my siblings in Santa Barbara. My father said he would help take care of his kids, but he didn’t. He would only come and stay at the house my mother rented for us sometimes, and then leave. He only caused problems for us.
17. One day when my father came home, he was very, very nervous. Something had gone wrong, but as always he would not say anything about it. Then, he left. Weeks passed and he did not come by the house again. I realized later that my father had fled. He fled to avoid having to pay for his problems, but he didn’t say anything to us, his children, about what the problems were. He could have warned us, but he didn’t. He left us to pay for his problems.
My Abduction and Torture by Men Seeking My Father
18. After my father disappeared, while I was heading back home in the afternoon, a truck passed by me and blocked the path in front of me. There were many men inside the truck and two stepped off. These two men looked like bodyguards because they had guns and wore masks so I couldn’t see their faces. One of the men got in front of me and the other stood behind. The man who was behind me hit me very hard on both sides of my head. He pressed against my ears and I heard a pop from inside my ears. Eventually I passed out.
19. I reawakened and realized they were taking me into the truck bed. There was blood running down from my ears. I tried to get up and get away, but they hit me in the chest very hard with the butt of a large gun. The pain was horrible. I stopped trying to get away. Then they put me face down in the truck and put a blindfold over my eyes. They drove with me in the truck for a while and then took me to a place indoors. I could not tell exactly where I was because of the blindfold. I could only see part of the floor through the bottom of the blindfold. They put me into some sort of a seat and tied my hands behind me.
20. The men who abducted me knew exactly who I was even if I did not know them. They knew I was my father, Jim’s son. Over a day, they tortured me. While these men tortured me, they asked for my dad’s head again and again. They interrogated me to try to get me to tell them where my father was. I told them I didn’t know. They didn’t believe me. They didn’t believe that a son wouldn’t know where his father was, so they continued to torture me.
21. Apart from what they did to my ears, they left scars all over my head from this torture. For example, on my right temple, I have a mark like a scratch mark that will not go away from when they kicked me down to the ground and pressed a foot against my head. I have another scar on my chin from when they punched me in the face. They kicked my back while I was on the ground, and hit me very hard with something on the left back side of my head when they pulled me up. The spot where they hit me is still very tender and hurts.
22. After beating me for about a day the men took me away and dumped me by my home. They told me that this had only been a warning. They warned me that if my father did not appear, the next time there would be deaths and they would kill me. They said they were going to give my father a time, but then if he didn’t show up they would kill me or my siblings.
23. I do not know exactly who these men are because my father refused to ever tell us about his problems, and I don’t remember the men ever identifying themselves to me while I was tortured, and they kept a blindfold on me almost the entire time. I am not sure what exactly my father was involved in before he fled because he never told us anything. However, from the way they were armed and how they acted, I know they must be members of a criminal group, and very powerful. They kidnapped me around the Copan area, which is an area with a lot of drug trafficking. They tortured me with the idea that, since I am his son, I would tell my dad and he would come forward so they won’t hurt his son. But my dad doesn’t care. I am certain they will kill me if they see me again.
My Flight to the United States
24. After the torture, I was very badly injured. I was afraid to go out far from my home, so I didn’t got to a hospital, which was further away, and so a nurse did us a favor and came by the house informally. I kept a low profile as I got better. My hearing has never come back completely since the torture. I finally spoke to my mother about a little bit of what had happened and she said my siblings and I had to flee the country. I had to come first because I was the one in most danger, as one of the oldest sons of my father. The men searching for my father had already directly threatened to kill me, his son, once they came back.
25. I fled to the United States the first time in or around September 2013. I was detained by immigration in Texas and deported back to Honduras almost immediately. When I was detained in Texas, everything happened very quickly. I just remember telling the officer who spoke to me who my dad and mom were. I only told him that I had come to work to help my mother because I did not feel safe or comfortable telling him about what had happened in Honduras. My ears were still very bad at that point from the beating. There was no one who visited me in the detention center to explain what the immigration laws were like there was this time.