More Mexicans seek asylum in U.S. as drug violence rises

A Texas lawyer is among those trying to broaden the definition of asylum, dismaying conservative critics and some Mexican officials.

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
October 28, 2012

EL PASO — One of his clients, a Mexican waitress and widowed mother of three, says she played dead under a pile of bodies to survive a massacre in Ciudad Juarez led by men she recognized as federal police.

Another client says Chihuahua state police hacked off his feet after he refused to pay them bribes.

They came to El Paso seeking Carlos Spector, 58, a burly, hard-charging immigration attorney who has developed a strange specialty in this Texas border city. His clients, instead of crossing into the United States illegally and hiding out, are seeking asylum.

To the dismay of conservative critics in the U.S. who call asylum seekers "narco refugees" and some officials in Mexico who call them "traitors," Spector has been trying to broaden the definition of asylum, a status granted to those fleeing persecution in their home countries. He calls them "exiles."

Compared with those fleeing other countries, relatively few Mexicans have been granted asylum. Still, the number of applications has risen rapidly and reflects, Spector says, the collapse of order in parts of Mexico. Read more.