Here are some more facts about their situation I found. I would like to know if this info makes you reconsider your reflexively heartless zenophobia.
They are ethnic Chinese and Christian and were living in a country where both groups were major targets during deadly riots in 1998 set off by the nation’s economic collapse under the strongman Suharto.
“Bad things were happening,” said Sinta Penyami Storms, who runs an Indonesian dance studio in South Philadelphia and is herself an immigrant. Food was scarce and unemployment was high.
“It was unsafe for them to go out. There was a lot of robbery of houses, and rapes of Chinese Indonesians,” Storms said. More than 300 people were killed in the unrest.
The couple is Catholic; Indonesia is majority Muslim, and although it is not a religious state, there is discrimination against Christians. “It’s hard to go to church, your church can’t get a permit to have a house of worship. They’re a double minority,” Storms said.
[...]
Indonesians are particularly vulnerable to deportation orders because, despite the continued harassment and sometime violence in their country against ethnic Chinese and Christians, many of them have been denied asylum.
But even now, those rejected can have their cases reconsidered if they can demonstrate that circumstances in their home country have significantly worsened since they originally filed their petition.
An Indonesian Christian man recently did that, Casazza said, and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order that the Bureau of Immigration Affairs (BIA) take his petition seriously. This ruling provides hope for his clients, Casazza said; three days after the Philadelphia couple was detained, he filed petitions on their behalf to reopen their case “on the grounds that there are changes in the circumstances in their home country regarding the treatment of Christians.”
The Court of Appeals
ruling, written by Judge (and former Pennsylvania First Lady) Marjorie Rendell, and handed down in April – on Good Friday, no less – chastised the BIA for “an abuse of discretion” by essentially ignoring reams of documentation and evidence presented by the petitioner backing his claim that conditions for Christians in his homeland had deteriorated.
“Because the BIA did not explain its conclusion and did not meaningfully consider much of the evidence presented by Liem, we will grant his petition for review, vacate the denial of his second motion to reopen, and remand to the BIA for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” the decision said.
^^^ Theirs was and remains a textbook case for political asylum. Don't be an all too eager lapdog for a cruelly unAmerican system.
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