Opinion ID: 2319442
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Asylum Applications and Hearing

Text: On July 25, 2002, shortly after her arrival in the United States, Kante filed an application for asylum because she was a victim of violence in her home town of Macenta, Guinea, in October 2001. In that original application, filed without assistance of counsel, Kante claims that rebels broke into her family compound and beat and raped her and tortured or raped every member of her family. Kante claimed her parents were taken away after the attack and that she then fled Macenta. In the original application, Kante did not claim the attacks had any politically-related motive or that the attackers were in any way affiliated with the government. She stated that the rebels took her family's money and belongings. In response to a question on the application as to whether Kante or any member of her family had ever been threatened or mistreated by government authorities, she checked no. Her case was referred to the Immigration Court. In August 2005, Kante, represented by counsel, filed a second application in which she claimed that she and her family were attacked by rebels of unknown affiliation, but that her family was targeted by government security forces due to her father's and brothers' support of the opposition RPG forces. A hearing on the two asylum applications was held on June 11, 2007. Kante first testified that her father was in charge of RPG meetings and marches, but then said that he and her brothers were RPG members who only attended events. She testified that her father had been warned to stay off the RPG by people who stole from the store and shot at the store. She testified that on October 10, 2001, a car entered the family compound and a dozen armed men dressed in camouflage attacked the family. She said that the men told her father that they had warned him before but he wouldn't listen. She claims that she was raped and beaten into unconsciousness by the men and her family taken away in a truck. When she awoke, her family was gone. She testified that she had heard that they attacked another family in the neighborhood as well. Kante traveled to Conakry, a larger city about 7 or 8 hours from her town. She was unable to learn what happened to her family. After five months she went back to her home, but no one was there. A friend of her father's helped her get a passport, and she was a stowaway on a boat headed for the United States. When she arrived, a man named Mohammad, also from Guinea, helped her with the original asylum application. On cross-examination, Kante admitted that rebel groups from Sierra Leone came to Macenta in 2001 and that the group that attacked her family could have been from Sierra Leone. She admitted that she stated in her first asylum application that the group that attacked her family took money and property from them and that she had not conveyed in the first application her claim that she heard the rebels tell her father that he had been warned but would not listen.