Opinion ID: 785832
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Application and Testimony

Text: 2 Tawadrus is a fifty-four year old native and citizen of Egypt, where he resided with his wife and three children. He and his family are members of the Coptic Christian Church, the Egyptian branch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Tawadrus and his wife, both engineers, founded their own engineering and construction business in 1985. The heart of Tawadrus' asylum claim is that members of certain government-controlled agencies placed economic sanctions on him for failing to convert to Islam. 3 Tawadrus' written application focuses on three incidents in which certain agencies withheld money due to him for his construction work — one in 1992 involving the Development and Agriculture Bank, Cairo, and two in 1995 involving the Nile General Contracting Company for Construction and Rehabilitation and the Port Said Housing Authority. As a result of receiving no payment on these projects, Tawadrus was left with no income whatsoever even to raise and support [his] family. He was also unable to continue to earn a living as a contractor because he was known to subcontractors, banks and creditors as being delinquent with payments. 4 In his oral testimony, Tawadrus described two incidents in which he was beaten by unknown groups of Islamic fundamentalists. As a result of shock from the second incident, Tawadrus had a heart attack for which he was treated in both Cairo and London, where his brother lived. After remaining in London for five months, Tawadrus returned briefly to Egypt to secure a visa from the U.S. Consulate, returning to London to depart for the United States, where he entered Dallas, Texas on December 6, 1997. After exceeding his six-month authorization, the Immigration and Naturalization Service instituted removal proceedings on July 17, 1998.