Guatemalans facing deportation sue U.S.

Guatemalan immigrants who face deportation filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government this week, claiming their applications for asylum were improperly processed and unfairly denied. About 200 families are represented in the lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles.

But the outcome could affect close to 200,000 Guatemalans who had applied for refugee status, said Byron Vasquez, director of Casa de la Cultura de Guatemala, a Los Angeles-based advocacy organization.

Over the last 40 years, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans have fled their civil war-torn country for the U.S. Many obtained work permits and applied for political asylum. As the result of a previous lawsuit and subsequent federal court ruling, Guatemalan immigrants were allowed to apply for an asylum hearing if they entered the country on or before Oct. 1, 1990.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Guatemalans continued to come to the U.S. in the 1990s. The country’s civil war ended in 1996.

These immigrants applied for refugee status but were lumped together with the asylum applicants who were beneficiaries of the earlier lawsuit. As a result, many had to wait years for their cases to be adjudicated, Vasquez said.

Now many of them who have put down roots in the U.S. face deportation, he said.

“They’ve spent an important period of their lives, young adults, when they could establish themselves with some sort of career,” said Jesse A. Moorman, a lawyer with Human Rights Project, which is representing the Guatemalans. “It’s all been over here, and so to be forced to transport life back there now, when there’s still many problems, is quite a difficult prospect.”

Sharon Rummery, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. Under the law, eligible asylum applicants must prove past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.

After a one-year dip, the number of Guatemalans deported has steadily increased, from 3,429 in 1999 to 12,529 in 2005, the most recent fiscal year for which government statistics were available.

“The civil war has ended, but from what I understand, many, many problems of poverty and inequality exist,” said Kevin Terraciano, professor of Latin American history at UCLA. “I am opposed to that program to send people back to a war-torn country in which justice has not been served,” he said. “Many of those problems that forced those people to flee to begin with remain, and are, in my opinion, related to bad U.S. policy in Central America.”

tami.abdollah@latimes.com