Parish helps woman fight deportation to the Congo

The May 5, 2005 Catholic Herald reports on Regina Bakala's efforts to remain in the United States. She is a member of the neighboring parish of St. Mary's in Hales Corners, Wisconsin. At our parish this morning there were petitions to support her cause.

Here is the version of her attempt to gain asylum given by School Sister of Notre Dame Josephe Marie Flynn, St. Mary director of adult and family ministry at St. Mary's.

"Her first lawyer said he was not an immigration attorney, but he took her $4,000 -- all the money she had -- prepared a flawed affidavit and told her he was not authorized to represent her in an immigration court," said Sr. Flynn. When the translator read back to Regina her small, four-page affidavit, she objected that he had left out the paragraph about being jailed and raped. "She told him you can't leave that out," said Sr. Flynn. "The translator assured her that the affidavit would be changed, so she signed it, trusting it would be."

Affidavit means a document not only signed, but signed under oath. The words above the notarization, "Subscribed and sworn to before me..." mean what they say, as any Notary Public, let alone lawyer, ought to know. So you can't just sign the document without first taking an oath, nor sign it and then have someone insert some essential information afterward.

In this case, the essential information for Mrs. Bakala's case is her claim to have been jailed and raped, and after her release from jail being gang-raped by soldiers of the Sese Seko Mobutu government, all due to her membership in the P.A.L.U. political party, named after Patrice Lumumba, who Mobutu had overthrown. (The article notes that Mobutu was later overthrown by Laurent Kabila, making it somewhat unclear what the current basis of Bakala's claim for asylum is.) Her case was eventually heard. As Sr. Flynn describes it,

"The transcript of Regina's hearing is painful to read. She tries to tell her story, the translator keeps interrupting, and an irritated judge tells her to just answer the questions. In the end, he says her written testimony does not mention the time in jail and rapes so he concludes that she is making this up on the stand. He rules against her, calling her case 'frivolous,'" said Sr. Flynn.

The case is now on appeal.

In his Herald of Hope column in that issue, titled Church speaks up for refugees, immigrants, Archbishop Dolan says

While we recognize there are necessary laws that must be respected, we also defend the human rights of a woman who now wonders if the words on the Statue of Liberty are a sham.

If the laws are to be respected, then the issue is Bakala's legal status as established by the procedures set forth by law, not her status under Emma Lazarus's poem. (As to the words on the statue, those are "July 4, 1776" [in Roman numerals].)