No one expected the applicants to actually receive asylum, or even for the claims to be given fair consideration. The U.S. refugee program was created after World War II to admit immigrants from Communist countries as a Cold War-era political statement. In contrast, the violence in El Salvador was supported by the U.S., which was backing the Salvadoran government’s repressive regime. Accepting Salvadoran asylum seekers would be tantamount to admitting not only that there was a problem in El Salvador, but also that the United States had some culpability. So, with every application filed, Manzo received a form letter explaining that the applicant didn’t qualify under asylum regulations. “There was no way of winning an asylum case no matter how well you did it,” Lupe Castillo, the Manzo staffer, explained. “It was impossible; it was a political decision.”
Manzo couldn’t win an asylum case, but they could gum up the machinery. The more applications they filed, the slower the court would process the cases; since Cowan was always the designated lawyer, the court couldn’t hold simultaneous hearings. The payment of bond meant that the applicants were released during the waiting period for their hearing, which could be months if not years away. Moreover, the court system did not track the asylum applicants who bonded out. “They didn’t have any idea how to transfer a case to, like, Baltimore or San Francisco,” said Cowan. In practice, this meant that the bonded-out Salvadorans were undocumented, but free to live their lives.
By the end of that summer, about 3,000 people were bonded out; at the same time, the volunteers were drained and short on funds. Though Fife had reached out to a nationwide network of churches to raise bond monies, there wasn’t enough for everyone who needed to be released. Some detainees got fed up waiting at El Centro and allowed themselves to be deported; others committed suicide. The midnight drives, too, took their toll. “Emotionally, it was really taxing,” recalled former Manzo volunteer Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith. The program was finally undone when the INS office in Tucson said it would no longer allow detainees to be bonded out to Southside’s custody.
Yet the situation in El Salvador continued to worsen, and Manzo, Fife, and Corbett remained committed. Soon, Corbett approached Fife with a novel, and illegal, idea. “Jim came to me and said, ‘John, we don’t have any choice under the circumstances but to start smuggling people across the border,’” recalled Fife. Not only was the bonding strategy taxing, the asylum applications were pointless, the detention facility inhumane, and the number of people who needed assistance ever greater. Corbett had realized that it would be better if the migrants were never arrested and sent to jail in the first place. He had begun to piece together an underground railroad, with the intention of putting himself on the line so as to help people cross into the United States undetected.