Colombian Pushes Envelope of Asylum System

A Colombian engineer seeking asylum in New York who says she was kidnapped for her computer expertise by the leftist rebels that control swaths of Colombia, is asking American immigration judges to take a new look at what it means to be a refugee.

Maria Del Pilar Delgado was a software engineer who worked for a bank, eschewed politics, and owned a home in a pleasant Cali neighborhood. It was a quiet life that she said had rarely been touched by the decades-long civil war between guerillas and the government — until the guerillas decided to update their revolution for the Internet age.

On a January day nearly six years ago, Ms. Del Pilar says a band of combat boot-clad rebel fighters captured her and carried her into the mountains to a rough camp, where they kept her for three days. They told her she would be mounting a network of computers, modems, and other communications equipment for the Colombian Armed Revolutionary Forces. No matter that the only water at the camp was from a dirty, shallow well and that her captors barely had enough food. Soon, the FARC had its own Web site with links to video and regular news updates. But Ms. Del Pilar says she had nothing to do with setting up the rebels with an Internet connection and launching them into a tech-savvy era.

Instead, she says she escaped and is now waiting for an immigration court in New York to decide if she will be allowed to stay in America, or if she will be sent back to Colombia.

Although all the judges that have heard her case have accepted her tale as fact, the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed a lower immigration judge's ruling denying Ms. Del Pilar's asylum request, arguing that her experience was not persecution because she was targeted as a computer expert — not a group the government typically recognizes as a persecuted class. In its opinion, the board wrote that she had "failed to demonstrate that she possesses a well-founded fear of future persecution."

Ms. Del Pilar is adamant that she would face certain death if she ever stepped foot in Colombia again: She says the rebels told her so as they dropped her off in the outskirts of a small mountain town after three days in the woods.

They had waited for the computer equipment to arrive, but the shipment hit a snag and was late. Rather than keep Ms. Del Pilar at the camp, a small group of guerillas toting machine guns took her back to where they had picked her up.

She says they told her to wait in town, and that they would easily find her again if she escaped.

It was a small tourist town, Silvia, where Ms. Del Pilar had often spent weekends with friends, but she looked at every face warily as she made her way to the home of a family friend.

Piling borrowed clothes onto her small frame as a disguise, Ms. Del Pilar rode out of the village on the back of a motorcycle with a cap pulled down to obscure her face.

Back in Cali, she abandoned her house, and her two dogs. She reported her case to police, but she said they did nothing except to advise her to get out of town.

So in 2002, she moved to New York and applied for asylum. Her case has been winding through the courts since then, until a New York Court of Appeals decision in November first reported by the New York Law Journal offered her a ray of hope. The court remanded her case, noting serious flaws in the lower courts' decisions.

Still, Ms. Del Pilar says she can't relax yet. She now lives in Baltimore, where she is trying to recreate the quiet stability she once had in Cali.

But the nightmares of her kidnapping replay constantly, she says.

"I live it every day. I'm always worried they'll deport me," she said. "I just want to live a normal life."