Feb 20, 2009  |  By: Lou Chibbaro Jr.  | COMMENTS     

A gay man from the African nation of Sierra Leone is contesting a preliminary U.S. immigration decision to deny his request for political asylum.

Federal officials say the man, 29-year-old Dunrick Sogie-Thomas of Hyattsville, Md., failed to provide sufficient evidence that he would be subjected to arrest, torture and possibly death if forced to return to his home country.

But Sogie-Thomas says he was outed as gay last year in Sierra Leone, prompting members of his family to threaten to have him killed should he return to the capital city of Freetown, where he was born and raised.

The laws of Sierra Leone, a former British colony, classify homosexual acts as a crime punishable by up to life imprisonment.

“Dunrick gravely fears and is at particular risk of being arrested, tortured, detained, imprisoned, or killed by both his family and the authorities,” according to a 12-page brief that his attorney filed earlier this month with the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services.

In November, the CIS, an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, issued a Notice of Intent to Deny an application for asylum that Sogie-Thomas filed on his own without the help of an attorney.

“In order to receive asylum, an asylum-seeker must show actual past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion,” said Asylum Office director Ann M. Palmer in her Nov. 19 Notice of Intent to Deny Sogie-Thomas’s asylum request.

“The persecutor you fear [is] that portion of the general society that is homophobic,” Palmer said in the notice. “You have not shown that such a persecutor is aware of your characteristic,” she said. “You have not shown that the government has an inclination to persecute you.”

Sogie-Thomas has since retained the services of attorney Christopher Nugent of the Washington law firm Holland & Knight, which specializes in immigration and asylum cases. Nugent said the firm was able to take Sogie-Thomas’s case on a pro-bono basis because he is unemployed and could not afford the legal fees associated with an asylum application.

Nugent said that Sogie-Thomas was unfamiliar with the legal precedents and procedural issues that could have helped him make a stronger case for asylum.

Among the points that Nugent stressed in subsequent legal documents filed on Sogie-Thomas’s behalf is that Sogie-Thomas avoided persecution in the past by concealing his sexual orientation from his family, neighbors and co-workers.

But his quiet life in the closet was shattered last summer, Nugent said, when Sierra Leone police raided the apartment of his domestic partner and discovered photographs of Sogie-Thomas and his partner engaging in sex.

Authorities then appeared at the home of his parents and relatives as well as at his place of work, informing his family members and employer and co-workers that he is gay, Nugent said.

“We’re hopeful that the asylum office will reconsider their decision given the clear risk of harm, including torture, incarceration or death to our client, Dunrick, based on the plethora of additional evidence that’s been submitted,” Nugent said.

“It shows that there’s a clear pattern and practice of persecution of outed homosexuals in Sierra Leone,” he said. “We believe he would even face the prospect of being arrested upon arrival at the airport.”

Visa expires next week

Sogie-Thomas has been living in the U.S. since August on a tourist visa that is scheduled to expire Feb. 27. If the CIS doesn’t act on his asylum application by that time, immigration authorities would likely begin deportation proceedings against him, Nugent said.

Sogie-Thomas could appeal the deportation action, Nugent said, but he was hopeful that the asylum application would be approved soon on the administrative level by the CIS.

In a legal brief filed earlier this month, Nugent says that Sierra Leone police confiscated sexually explicit photos of Sogie-Thomas and his domestic partner during a police raid of the partner’s apartment in August. Police raided the apartment as part of an investigation into allegations that the partner was involved in a cocaine ring. Sogie-Thomas has said he was not aware of his partner’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking until the time of the man’s arrest in July.

Nugent’s brief says that authorities in Sierra Leone visited Sogie-Thomas’s family members, including his mother, at their homes in Freetown to inform them about the discovery of the photos, which show Sogie-Thomas and his partner engaging in sexual acts with each other.

Sogie-Thomas said he and his partner sometimes photographed themselves engaging in sex. He said the photographs were taken and remained in the privacy of their homes. Authorities ...