But their fate hangs on wary courts.
EL PASO, Texas — Amidu Fredrick Sinayor came to this quiet border town from his native Ghana, where he was persecuted for being gay. Abdi, from Somalia, came here to escape Islamist militants who he says tortured him at home.
Since late December, dozens of Africans seeking asylum have entered the United States not by flying directly into the country, but by going first to South or Central America and then trekking northward along the "Migrant Trail" that has been used for decades by Latino migrants to cross into the U.S. from Mexico.
It is an extremely dangerous journey, even for Latin Americans who know the region's customs and political realities, let alone for migrants who don't speak the language and have little in common with the local population. They must walk for hundreds of miles in the jungle, pay off corrupt border officials and the human smugglers known as coyotes, and sometimes battle thieves.
If they survive this harrowing journey and finally cross onto American soil, then their dreams of achieving asylum depend to a shocking extent on which border town they choose to enter the United States. In some jurisdictions, judges grant asylum to 62% of those who come before them. In others, judges grant just 13%, according to federal data collected by the University of Syracuse's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Sinayor and Abdi told BuzzFeed the story of their journeys from Africa to the U.S. Both ended up in the same detention center in the same border town. Abdi, who on Monday spent eight hours in an asylum hearing, is expected to learn his fate following a July 15 hearing. Sinayor's hearings are scheduled to begin in August.
Sinoyar first thought he would go to South Africa.
He had been seeking to flee Ghana, where intercourse between men is criminalized, since last summer, after he had been repeatedly attacked by the Ga Mashie Youth for Change, a group that beats up gay and lesbian Ghanaians because of their sexuality, and his computer business had been burned down. "They hit me with sticks, whips and their hands," Sinayor said in his asylum application of a November 2012 attack. "They told me this was just a warning and the next time they would come with petrol and burn me to death."
"When I went outside, people would say, 'Here comes the animal,' 'He prefers sex with men more than women,' 'Hey, people, cover your asses or you will get fucked by someone,'" he said. "They would tell me, 'We are going to beat or stone you to death one of these days' … or 'We will hand you over to the police to lock you up like an animal.'"
A.C. Wowolo, a police superintendent in Sakumono, Ghana, said police were unable to charge the local leader of the Ga Mashie Youth who coordinated attacks on Sinayor because: "The Chief and his elders and some politicians both supported this youth movement that targets homosexuals and lesbians … leaving the police with little to do to fully defend and protect the victims," he wrote in a letter to the El Paso immigration court, given to BuzzFeed by Sinayor's lawyer.
So Sinayor fled. He took a bus to Togo, then Benin, then Nigeria, where he considered fleeing to South Africa, because of its constitutional protection of LGBT rights and marriage equality. But cultural acceptance has lagged behind the law, and after seeing news reports from South Africa about violence against gay men, Sinayor decided that the United States was his best bet for asylum.
He traveled to Cameroon, where he paid some sailors $2,000 to hide him in a container ship engine room. After two weeks in his cramped hiding place, allowed out briefly only at night, Sinayor stepped off the boat and onto the shores of Colombia.
After a few days, Sinayor connected with a group of other Africans — mostly Somalis, but also another Ghanaian who fled because he was gay — and began the trek north. Coyotes took them to a well-worn path near the border of Colombia and Panama, where they paid villagers to help them cross. "We walked for two days in the jungle. People had been walking it, so we just followed the path."
When they reached the border, the group turned themselves over to Panamanian authorities, explaining that they were heading to America in search of asylum. This became the pattern: Sinayor would follow migrant trails through the jungle, find a patrolled border crossing, and turn himself over to the local authorities, who after taking him and his fellow travelers into custody would eventually issue them all special papers allowing them to traverse the country.
Detention lengths varied. Costa Rica did not detain them at all and granted them transit papers right away, while in Panama they were taken to the capital and jailed for a month before being released with travel documents and a warning to be out of the country within two weeks.
For migrants, particularly Africans and others who speak little or no Spanish, such travel documents give protection from jailing, but more importantly, they let them travel in the open on buses, a much faster — and far safer — way of traveling than relying on local coyotes.
And yet sometimes coyotes — who are little more than guides, often connected to drug cartels and other criminal organizations — are necessary. They shepherded Sinoyar's group into Nicaragua, and another took them over a mountain on the Honduras–Guatemala border. At Mexico's southern border, coyotes helped them across the Suchiate River "on a raft made of tubes with plywood on top."
On Feb. 15, Sinayor crossed one of the four bridges connecting the Mexican border town of Juarez and El Paso, Texas, approached the first American official he saw, and asked for asylum.