San Francisco Chronicle: Court bars deporting Chinese woman

San Francisco -- A young Chinese woman who has spent the past 17 months in jail since fleeing to San Francisco from China after police linked her to the outlawed Falun Gong [group] is eligible for political asylum in the United States, a federal appeals court ruled.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco bars immigration authorities for the time being from deporting Mei Ling Gao, who is now being held in the Sacramento County Jail.

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Gao, who lived in China's coastal city of Changle, was arrested in March 2000 when police found two Falun Gong books in a drawer behind the counter of her father's bookstore, where she was working. She was released 10 days later after paying a fine, but reportedly learned from a police source that she was on a list of Falun Gong [practitioners]. That meant she could face re-arrest and worse treatment because of the government's crackdown on the [group].

Her family helped her to leave the country, and she was arrested after arriving at San Francisco International Airport last year. Gao had no connection to Falun Gong or to the books, which had been left by a customer, said Douglas Payne [Ms. Gao’s lawyer]

A U.S. immigration board ruled then that Gao did not qualify for asylum on the grounds of political persecution, saying that she had no connection to Falun Gong and noting that her father, who owned the bookstore, had not been arrested. But the appeals court said Gao faced persecution because police believed she belonged to the [group]. [note – Falun Gong is not political. Practitioners simply want to end Jiang’s vicious persecution as soon as possible.]

"Gao showed that the police actually imputed membership in the Falun Gong to her personally," the three-judge panel said in the ruling Thursday. "There was no need to show that other members of her family were also persecuted."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/10/26/BA50411.DTL