Just when we thought Attorney General Ashcroft couldn't get any further out there with his radical right policies limiting individual rights, he gets even worse. Now he's about to go after abused women immigrants. He is considering reversing regulations that allow abused women to obtain asylum in the U.S.

Ashcroft is also considering new gender-persecution regulations for asylum-seekers instead of a proposed set that was left hanging in the final days of the Clinton administration.

The law allows asylum only for foreigners who can show they face persecution in their home countries because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Before leaving office, Reno vacated the board's decision [in a case involving a Guatamalan woman, Rodi Alvarado, described below] and proposed regulations that would allow battered women to be granted asylum as members of a social group if they can show government complicity in their suffering. President Bush suspended this and all other pending regulations upon taking office.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and other immigrant and women's groups say they fear Ashcroft intends to issue new regulations that would severely restrict women fleeing gender-based persecution, such as honor killings and sexual slavery as well as domestic violence, from obtaining asylum. In a letter to Ashcroft on Thursday, 48 House Democrats and one independent urged him to abandon any such plans.

The regulations that Reno proposed were the result of the case of a Guatamalan woman, Rodi Alvarado, who fled to the U.S. "after her husband repeatedly raped her, whipped her with electrical cords, broke windows and mirrors with her head, and vowed to kill her if she tried to leave him."

An immigration judge granted her asylum in 1996, finding that the 10 years of abuse Alvarado suffered and the persistent failure of Guatemalan authorities to protect her entitled her to relief. The Immigration and Naturalization Service appealed and the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals reversed that decision in 1999. The board did not question Alvarado's credibility, but said in a 10-to-5 ruling that neither the beatings nor her opinions about them qualified her for asylum.

After Reno's regulations were proposed, Alvarado's case went back to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) for reconsideration--with instructions to wait until the regulations were acted upon. But the regulations weren't acted upon, and Alvarado's case has been hung up in legal limbo-land--until now. It seems Ashcroft has decided to personally review the case and reconsider her grant of asylum. And it seems he doesn't intend to sign off on Reno's regulations--they would have to be approved by both Ashcroft and Tom Ridge of Homeland Security to become actual "rules"--instead he is considering his own gender-persecution regulations, which will likely result in Ms. Alvarado being forced to return to Guatamala.

But, there's more. As we reported in January, Ashcroft has decided to halve the number of appointees on the Board of Immigration Appeals, from 23 to 11. The Washington Post article today states that all five BIA members Ashcroft has dropped in accord with his planned reduction are Clinton administration appointees and three were dissenters in the Alvarado case.

The Board of Immigration Appeals hears the cases of foreigners who contend they face torture, death or other "travails" if they are returned to their home country. The 23 member board reviews the cases of 220 immigration judges around the country. In January, there was a backlog of 56,000 cases, and Ashcroft decreed the board must get current by March 25.

The board handles 30,000 - 40,000 cases a year. It is the last resort for most immigrants facing deportation, as only a few thousand have been able to appeal to the federal courts. In January, there was strong criticism of the board because in attempting to reduce its backlog as Ashcroft directed, it was deciding cases literally within minutes. As T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a law professor at Georgetown University and former Immigration and Naturalization Service general counsel said "We are already seeing results: Many, many cases are decided at a speed that makes it impossible to believe they got the scrutiny a person who faces removal from the United States deserves." (Jan. 5, L.A. Times, no longer on line).

Ashcroft has become a one-man steamroller, crushing constitutional and human rights that have been the hallmark of this country for 200 years. He, Bush and Rumsfeld, have embarked on a non-stop drive to instill the fear of terrorism in the heart of every American. They have formed a virtual "axis of aggrandizement" (our phrase) that if allowed to proceed unchecked, will be impossible to reverse within our lifetimes. Their cabal extends from insisting Congress enact laws like the Patriot Act, to executive branch decisions like declaring U.S. citizens to be enemy combatants and denying them due process, to packing the federal judiciary with right wing extremists and judicial activists.

Someone needs to stop this train.