More immigrants cite gangs in seeking asylum

WASHINGTON -- Increasing numbers of Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans are entering the United States illegally and applying for asylum on the grounds that their lives are imperiled by gang violence in their home countries, according to immigration lawyers and advocacy groups.

Although the number granted asylum barely surpassed 700 last year, asylum applications by people from those three countries have almost doubled, a fact lawyers attribute primarily to fear of gang violence.

The lawyers hope to persuade judges to more readily grant asylum to those who have risked reprisal by resisting extortion demands by gangs, testifying against gang members, or trying to avoid being forced to join gangs.

Gang violence has grown to epidemic proportions in the three countries since the mid-1990s, when the United States began sending Central American-born members of the rival Los Angeles-based Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18 gangs back to their home countries. The deportees helped fuel the rise of ferocious sister gangs in Central America, whose estimated 60,000 members are now battling each other, the police, and residents in hundreds of communities.

Many of those who say they fled gangs end up in the Washington area, which has one of the nation's largest Central American immigrant populations.