Will Mexico's Runaway Sheriff Find Asylum in U.S.?

TIME: When 20-year old criminology student Marisol Valles was sworn in as a police chief in the embattled Mexican state of Chihuahua in October, she became an instant celebrity as the bravest woman in Mexico. Pundits and media commentators cheered the slight, bespectacled, innocent-looking young mother who had the guts to stand up to the drug cartels. What made her especially valiant was the fact that her predecessor as police chief of the small farming town of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero had been kidnapped and beheaded. The new sheriff said she would not even carry a gun, but would focus instead on community policing to cure the murderous ills. Now, five months later, Valles has hit world news again with more ominous headlines: she has become the latest Mexican to seek political asylum in the United States. In her short-lived career she received reported death threats while many fellow police officers in Chihuahua were killed or fled. Like many asylum seekers, she will likely argue that her government is incapable of offering her protection from murderers. Nechman aruges that the tendency of U.S. judges to deny asylum to Mexicans is rooted in concern that doing otherwise would encourage more applications. With some six million Mexicans in the United States without papers, immigration officials want to be tough to make sure they don't all apply for asylum. "Especially here in Texas, there is a sense that if they grant Mexicans political asylum then the flood gates will open," Nechman says. In contrast, some other nationalities have had far greater success in applications. For example, in 2010 judges granted asylum to 3,795 of China's 10,087 applicants — a ratio some 20 times higher than the Mexicans. Judges also granted asylum to the majority of applicants from Armenia — 206 out of 232 applications.