A white South African family’s nine-year bid for political asylum in the United States, on bizarre grounds of racial persecution, was dealt a further setback this week by the United States Supreme Court.
David and Michelle Thomas and their two sons fled Durban and settled in southern California in 1997. They sought asylum from the US government, alleging that they had been the targets of violent attacks by black workers who worked under Michelle’s racist father-in-law, a construction foreman known as ”Boss Ronnie”.
The family claimed they had been harassed and threatened, their dog poisoned, their car tyres slashed and their home vandalised.
The Thomases applied for refugee status on unusual grounds: they claimed that the family was being persecuted as a ”social group” and that South African police had not done enough to protect them.
US asylum law allows refugee-seekers to enter the country if they are persecuted on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political affiliation or membership of a ”social group” — but does not specify the meaning of the last term.
At first an immigration court rejected the family’s application and ordered them to be deported. The family appealed, and the case eventually made its way last year to the ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, one step below the Supreme Court, which granted asylum.
However, on Monday this week the Supreme Court reprimanded the court for overstepping its bounds and ordered the case sent back to Board of Immigration Appeals, where it will enter the legal system all over again.
”We’re essentially back to square one, to put it mildly,” said Errol Horwitz, the family’s advocate. ”Unless there’s some understanding between us and the government, this situation is going to continue. It’s going to be a long time.”
Horwitz, a South African who specialises in immigration law, said a number of white South Africans fled to the US in the 1990s seeking political asylum. However, they had based their claims on racial, not family, grounds.
”They alleged black persecution,” he said. ”My understanding is they’ve applied on grounds of race and have not been successful.”
The family has declined to comment, he said.
Because the terms under which the Thomases applied for asylum are so unusual, the case was unlikely to affect other South African families in the US, Horwitz said. ”It’s certainly not a floodgate issue by any stretch of the imagination.”