By Julia Cheever
June 3, 2008
A federal appeals court panel in San Francisco said today it believes a Chinese folk dancer who lied on an asylum application shouldn’t get a second chance to try to remain in the United States.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said federal law and the asylum application forms signed by Xiao Min Chen clearly say that a person who files a frivolous or fraudulent application is permanently ineligible to move to the United States.
Chen said on forms she filed in 1999 that she had been married in China and that officials sought to force her to abort her second child. She said that under the pretext of telephoning her husband, she managed to escape from a hospital where she was taken for an abortion.
Later, Chen married an American citizen while living in the United States and sought to withdraw her asylum application and replace it with a request to be allowed to remain in the United States because of her marriage.
She admitted she was never married in China and never had children.
The court, acting on Chen’s appeal from rulings by immigration judges, said her original application was “rife with fraud” and that she had clear notice of the consequences.
But the panel sent the case back to the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals to decide a procedural question concerning at what point in the proceedings an immigration judge should rule that the original application was frivolous.
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