Mike and Carol Gormley hope to avoid deportation to South Africa.
Their brief, “Michael Anthony Gormley and Edith Carol Gormley v. John Ashcroft, United States Attorney General,” might just as well be titled “David v. Goliath.”
The odds of the middle-age Safeway grocery baggers winning their fight against deportation to their native South Africa, a case to be heard in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on April 1, might appear slim.
But in four years on Bainbridge, the couple has attracted a cadre of loyal friends, largely fellow workers who have helped them fight for the right to stay.
“The Gormleys are hard-working people,” said Safeway store manager Tony Martin. “If anyone deserves to stay (in the United States), they do. And I’m speaking not just as a store manager, but as a friend and supporter.”
The sentiments are more than just words. Safeway management and employees have raised funds for the couple’s legal defense and mustered community support.
Islander and fellow worker Sue Wilmot has been an especially staunch supporter, the Gormleys say, accompanying them to every hearing.
“I know these people,” Wilmot said. “I know that they’re worth something. And our government basically just brushed them aside.”
Whether the Gormleys stay in this country will turn on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ response to Seattle attorney Carol Edward’s brief, which contends that their loss of their livelihood – economic hardship inflicted upon the Gormleys by the South African government’s Employment Equity Act because they are Caucasian – amounts to persecution under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act.
Edward argues that the Employment Equity Act, passed to provide jobs for black South Africans whose job opportunities were limited under apartheid, “goes way beyond the conventional understanding of affirmative action” to “forcefully remove white South Africans from the workforce.”
Changing times
The Gormleys’ story is a tale of individuals caught up in larger events.
Their families, salt-of-the-earth working folk, were in South Africa long enough to be rooted there. Michael’s father came from Scotland, and his mother was born in South Africa to a family that had been there for generations; Carol’s grandparents hailed from from Yugoslavia, England and Germany.
The couple met in a coffee shop in Durban, the seacoast city in KwaZulu-Natal province. The shy Michael enlisted his sister to ask Carol if she would let him buy her a cup of coffee.
Michael’s low-key marriage proposal – he told Carol that her engagement ring would fit better than a signet ring he had recently given her – initiated a union that has lasted 35 years.
They worked hard, bought a house and raised a family. But their private lives intersected the larger history of a country undergoing change, when apartheid – a long-time policy of forced segregation of black and white South Africans – was abolished in 1991.
Mike Gormley recalls helping build the 20-foot-high stage upon which apartheid opponent Nelson Mandela made a famous 1990 speech, marking his release from years of imprisonment.
One of the first changes wrought by the end of apartheid, for the Gormleys, was that the couple no longer had to sneak black friends in their back door.
“When apartheid was done away with, I went and had a Tupperware party,” Carol Gormley said, “and I went and I invited all my black friends and all my white friends. My (white) neighbors were disgusted with me because I had them sit in the lounge with us and have tea and cookies and cake with us.
“And of course they turned their backs on us, my white friends did.”
Other changes were harder. Reforms intended to reverse the results of apartheid followed. In 1996, the Employment Equity Act sought to remedy decades of anti-black job discrimination by setting racial quotas for firms with more than 50 employees.
As a result, Michael Gormley lost a job he’d held for 32 years as a scaffolding contract supervisor. Carol Gormley was let go from a 14-year civil service post with Parcel Express.
White friends had been alienated by the Gormleys’ open acceptance of blacks as equals. Now, black friends, while sympathetic to the couple’s plight, also believed long-term inequities were being set right.
The Gormleys found that South Africa’s social landscape had changed beyond recognition.
“There wasn’t any sort of anger at what was happening,” Michael said. “We knew that there would be changes. But we didn’t expect them to happen so fast. We thought there’d be a gradual transition.”
Time to leave
When Michael Gormley applied for every job he could, including dishwasher, janitor and hotdog street vendor, he was told that he wouldn’t be hired because he was white.
When he twice was surrounded and violently robbed by groups of Africans, and then threatened with a car-jacking, the Gormleys, like many white South Africans, decided they had little choice but to leave.
The couple came to the United States on a visitor’s visa in June 1999, settling on Bainbridge Island to be near their daughter, Maureen Cruz.
They applied for political asylum, and went to the Seattle Immigration and Naturalization Service office for a first hearing in February 2000, and an individual hearing in May of that year.
The Gormleys waited five months, in compliance with an INS rule, to apply for a work permit, then waited another two months before the permit was granted and they found jobs at the Village Safeway.
The health benefits he received at work may have saved Michael Gormley, who is on a regimen of medication to treat congestive heart failure and has an implanted defibrillator – medical care he says he will lose if he and his wife are deported.
Informed by the INS that they would need a hearing, the Gormleys hired a Seattle attorney, but the lawyer proved incompetent, the couple and Wilmot say.
At the INS offices, the Gormleys were told their application didn’t meet the criteria for them to be deemed “persecuted,” although their story was judged credible.
They were referred to an immigration judge to confirm the denial, with a court date set for May 2000.
The Gormleys went to court with a new attorney assigned to them, a lawyer just out of school. Denied asylum by the immigration judge, the couple then decided to appear before the immigration board, the next step in the appeal process.
But after the Sept. 11 attacks, immigration cases were “streamlined” and the Gormleys’ case was summarily denied in early November 2002.
A letter to the Gormleys advised them to to leave the country by Nov. 30 of that year. Their last option was to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court.
Meanwhile, Wilmot and other Safeway workers had collected more than 1,200 signatures on petitions to demonstrate community support.
A customer with business ties to South Africa heard about the case and, through a prominent New York attorney friend, fixed the Gormleys up with Carol Edward, the president of Seattle’s Immigration Attorney Association.
A bake sale at Safeway raised $1,500 toward Edward’s $2,000 retainer.
“There was a $100 cookie that we sold,” Wilmot recalls.
More fund-raising followed, and the Carol and Michael Gormley Fund was established at Safeway’s Key Bank.
To date, islanders have quietly donated more than $13,000 toward the $18,000 legal fees.
“We want to thank all of Bainbridge,” Carol said. “We are so grateful.”
By Nov. 27, Edwards had filed a petition for review with the Ninth Circuit, and she had done what the Gormleys’ previous attorneys had not: explained their case step by step.
“This lady opened everything up for us,” Michael said.
The case will be heard by the Ninth Circuit on April 1, with a decision likely within two weeks. And when Edward rises to present her oral argument, the Gormleys’ friends will be there.
“There are at least 20 of us that are going on the 7:05 ferry with them,” Wilmot said.
“Anyone who wants to come with us is welcome.”
