Asylum seeker realized her dream but now is missing

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latimes.com/news/local/la-me-asylum24-2009oct24,0,6616785.story

Asylum seeker realized her dream but now is missing
After years on the run, Gilda Ghanipour stumbled upon a retired immigration judge and his Pepperdine law students, who championed her quest for asylum. She won her case. But she doesn't know it.

By Duke Helfand

October 24, 2009


Gilda Ghanipour has spent the last nine years on the run. Abandoned by her Muslim family for converting to Christianity, she has shuttled from one address to the next, terrified of being deported to her native Iran, where apostasy can be punished by death. Last year, Ghanipour stumbled upon a retired immigration judge and his Pepperdine University Law School students, who championed her quest for asylum. Ghanipour won the case. But she doesn't know it.

The devoutly religious woman vanished shortly before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services delivered on her dream at the end of August. Her Pepperdine legal advocates are desperately searching for her -- calling churches she frequented, scouring prison databases, knocking on doors where she once lived. Somewhere in Los Angeles, they believe, Ghanipour is wandering alone, as she has for most of the last decade, probably clutching her beloved Bible, possibly sleeping in a homeless shelter or in someone's spare bedroom. Police haven't been able to find her. The coroner has no record of her. Efforts by The Times to locate her through relatives, churches and homeless advocates also were unsuccessful.

The disappearance of the 49-year-old Ghanipour, who speaks three languages and once attended medical school, is especially difficult for those at Pepperdine Law School's Asylum Clinic. Gilda, as they've known her, was their first client. She offered the lawyers-in-training an early taste of victory. They have only a grainy black-and-white photo to remind them of her thick black hair, her proud smile, her opinionated ways. And they are worried, knowing that Ghanipour has been in ill health.

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Ghanipour recounted her life story in declarations accompanying her asylum application. According to the written statements, she spent her childhood in the city of Arak and her adolescence in Tehran, about 200 miles to the north. She married in 1979 shortly after graduating from high school and moved with her husband to Germany to escape the strict fundamentalist rule of the Islamic Revolution.

While in Germany, she studied medicine. She periodically visited relatives in California and returned briefly to Iran on several occasions to help her father sort out her mother's will. While touring historical sites on one of those trips, according to her declarations, she was arrested by the Iranian secret service and interrogated about suspicions that she was a German spy. The experience left her shaken. Divorced from her husband in Germany, she accepted an invitation to join her relatives in California, arriving in June 2000 on a six-month visitors visa, she wrote in the asylum papers.

While staying with a cousin in Diamond Bar, she had an encounter that would change her life. An evangelical Christian family knocked at the door. Their message about God's love through Christ resonated with Ghanipour, who had never been especially religious but had experienced what she described as an encounter with God after her mother's death years before in Iran.

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