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Unfortunately, the famous cases are not typical.  From

the moment most asylum seekers begin their flight from

persecution, they are focused on mere survival.36  They are

typically running away from personal danger and are primari-

ly concerned with saving their lives.37  When they arrive in

the United States, they often cannot express their fears of

persecution immediately or meet the application filing

deadline necessary for asylum protection.  Because many

asylum seekers have been persecuted by their governments,

they genuinely fear government officials and are unable or

unwilling to tell the truth about their persecution to

anyone they do not know and trust, let alone a uniformed

official.  Having been tortured or severely persecuted, many

suffer from mental disorders that impede their ability to

talk about what happened to them.

Moreover, those who travel without proper documents

often do so out of necessity because their governments,

which would normally grant them such documents, may also be

their persecutors.  It is unrealistic to expect those people

to ask their government for travel documents so that they

can flee the country or to require them to show their own

passports to their persecutor at flight.  Simply having such

documents with them would endanger their lives.  Such facts,

discussed at greater length in the following

paragraphs,reveal that IIRIRA's apparently innocuous reforms

are quite harsh indeed.

Trauma of Persecution Is Overwhelming

Torture victims, commonly thought of as the most de-

serving asylum applicants, typically cannot speak about

their persecution for some time after arriving in the United

States.  They may have great difficulty relating the details

of their persecution to their counsel or to U.S. authorities

until they have recovered from the trauma, sometimes months

or years after arriving in the United States.  Many suffer

from severe memory loss, depression, unresponsiveness, mis-

trust, flashbacks, and physiological symptoms when recalling

the traumatic events.38  The symptoms are often so over-

whelming that they cloud the sufferer's ability to seek

asylum protection, primarily because he or she needs to

suppress memories of the episodes to recover from the trau-

ma.39  Women who have been beaten and raped as a form of

persecution may need months of therapy to enable them to

speak about the episodes.  They typically mistrust others,