HIV POSITIVE CUBAN WINS ASYLUM

Alfonso Ramirez Batista was picked up by the US Border Patrol near the Mexican border one year ago.  Border Patrol officials thought he was a Mexican without authorization to be in the US.  However, he is a Cuban who came to the US as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980.  Like all Mariel Cubans he was paroled into the US, a legal fiction that maintains a person has never been officially admitted to the US, even though they are physically present.  Paroled aliens are not allowed to leave and reenter the US. 

Ramirez did leave the US, and lived for a year in Sonora, Mexico.  When he reentered the US, the INS detained him and he was convicted of illegal entry.  He applied for asylum, claiming that he would be persecuted in Cuba because he was a homosexual.  His sexual orientation had caused problems for him in Cuba, including detention, which is why he fled to the US in 1980.  The asylum case was not resolved and Ramirez was released.  

Later the INS again took Ramirez into custody.  A few months before, Ramirez had learned he was HIV positive, a fact he shared with the INS.  This new element made his case for asylum both stronger and more tenuous.  Persecution because of HIV is a basis for asylum, but HIV is also considered a communicable disease and can render a person inadmissible to the US.  Because Ramirez was only paroled into the US, he was subject to grounds of inadmissibility. 

The Cuban government segregates people with HIV in sanitariums, ostensibly because they present a health threat to the rest of the population.  The INS argued that this did not constitute persecution.  The Immigration Judge disagreed, finding that Ramirez did have a well-founded fear of future persecution on the basis of his homosexuality and HIV status and granting him asylum

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